Food Fight

At ten past seven on Sunday morning, after a night spent awake on the wing of his own ship with nothing to watch but the underside of a tarp, Zog opened the refrigerator in Sam Whitmore’s garage and found a regulation taped to it.

It hung on the door at the height of a human chest, which was a foot above Zog’s head, so he borrowed one of the half-empty paint cans that held down the corner of the tarp and stood on it to read. The letters were capitals, pressed hard into the paper, the capitals of someone who had written them at one in the morning and gone to bed without much faith in them.

ZOG — DO NOT EAT ANYTHING IN HERE. — SAM

He read it three times. Zog had spent eighty years as a clerk in the Department of Interplanetary Observation, where every regulation arrived in triplicate and was read, by anyone who hoped to keep his desk, in the same three passes: once for what it forbade, once for what it permitted, and once for what its author had forgotten to forbid. On Zogar only the third reading was considered binding. It was how the Department’s cafeteria had come to serve breakfast in the corridor.

He climbed down and took an inventory, because that was what one did on entering a new jurisdiction.

The refrigerator was an old one, retired to the garage when the kitchen got a better one. Nothing in Bakerfield was ever thrown away. It was only moved further from the house. Its light flickered. Its compressor muttered. On the top shelf stood four cans of Swamp Fizz, a soda of a green so nearly the right green that Zog found it difficult to look at directly. Behind the cans, in a rack of its own, sat the emergency vial of Zogarium, singing its thin high note, a power line crossed with a singing bowl, the only thing in the garage that looked lit from the inside. On the second shelf was a jar of something yellow-brown that was either mustard or a biohazard. He filed it under both. On the bottom shelf, alone, lay a flat cardboard box.

Stapled to its lid was an order slip from a pizza place in Carverton that delivered to Bakerfield under protest. The slip said SUN 10/12.

Zog counted on his three fingers, and then, having run out of fingers, counted again. “Seven days,” he said to the garage. He regarded the box with new respect. “This food predates my arrival. I would be eating my elder.”

He looked at the note. He looked at the box. The note was clear that nothing could be eaten in here. On the subject of out there, it was silent.

He took the box out of the refrigerator, closed the door, and stood with the box on the concrete a full arm’s length from the appliance, in plain compliance with every word Sam had written.

There were four slices inside, stiff at the edges, holding on to their cheese out of habit. He lifted one and sniffed it with the two slits that served him as a nose. When he pressed it with a finger, a small orange pool of grease gathered where the finger had been.

“On Zogar,” he said, “food does not age, because it is not alive.” He studied the slice. “This was once alive? Parts of an animal? Processed through heat, and combined with a fermented dairy product, and a paste made of fruit?”

The garage did not answer. It had been built in 1962 to hold two sedans and had since held one sedan, then no sedans, then a couch, then five idiots, then a spaceship under a blue tarp that did not quite reach its nose, and it had long ago stopped being surprised by what was asked of it.

“Humans eat corpse-cheese-fruit sandwiches?” Zog said. “Voluntarily?”

Since Wednesday he had eaten almost nothing but Cheddar Saturns, the orange puffs from Kevin’s purple bags, which had given him a faint orange glow of contentment and a great deal of time to wonder what else this planet kept in its boxes. His stomach was translucent. It had been empty since a little after three in the morning, and in the gray light from the side window it waited under his shirt like a clean desk.

He took a bite.

The sound was wet, and then it was wetter. From somewhere under his shirt came a long rolling gurgle, the noise of a small organ being handed a large job. The shirt was a white tee that reached his knees and said NOT AN ALIEN in black marker, and it was thin enough that anyone watching would have seen the bite arrive behind it: a pale wedge sliding down into the green, breaking apart, the crust going one way and the cheese going another, the sauce spreading in a slow red bloom.

Then, for one second, the whole of Zog went faint at the edges, as if somebody had started to erase him and thought better of it, and came back.

Nobody saw. Sam was asleep half a flight up, face down, with the light still on. Out on Starfighter Lane a paper skeleton taped to somebody’s front door for Halloween had come loose at one hip and was waving, very slowly, at nobody. Two doors down, nobody looked out of any window. A small green being in a borrowed cap flickered in a garage in Ohio, unwitnessed, and in Bakerfield a thing nobody saw had not, for most purposes, happened.

Zog swallowed. His eyes, which were already most of his face, got larger.

“Oh,” he said. “OH. This is DISGUSTING.”

He chewed faster.

“I love it.”