beans (life 7/?)

Everything tasted like plastic. The food, the water, the air. Plastic, plastic, goddamn fucking plastic.

It didn’t matter what they did: boiled it, added chemicals, extracted chemicals, purified it or mixed in tea to the drinking supply. The synthetic taint was there.

Or maybe it wasn’t that you could taste it, so much as you just knew it. Maybe it was your brain that made you think it tasted of plastic because it knew how it was stored? Could that happen?

This was the sort of thing they spoke about back at base. The sort of thing you needed to get your mind off your shift — at least he needed it — a distraction, even as inane as it was. There was nothing much else they could do.

There was never enough power to spare for putting on any of the videos they had found. There was no booze, and the rules were so strict about contact that you couldn’t play sport or have any other fun… Not that anyone wanted to.

He had seen how fast it spread. He had been part of quarantine and all of that. He had been through it all, had been on both ends of it all, but he still didn’t feel the same as everyone else.

They had all gotten cold, it seemed — buckled down, retreated inside of themselves — it was understandable, but he couldn’t be like that. It was unnatural: babies need hugs right? To grow up normal… People need to touch… it’s just the way it is. That’s what he thought, although he wasn’t really going to press the point with anyone. That’s a no-go subject these days.

***

He was just back from a day in the hole — eight hours of watching the road, not moving and sweating; ‘work’ — he had had a shower (and could practically taste the plastic on him now) and had plonked himself down in the canteen, waiting.

It was once a week she came in. Once a week their shifts let them cross paths. He was sure she felt similar about the touching, she must have… She would have had guys all over her before the fall. You don’t just forget that feeling of being with someone, holding someone. He couldn’t.

A classic beauty, he thought; her brown hair falling around her pale face, blue eyes shining out.

She was from across the state — a small town — and had worked in a restaurant before; you could taste it in what she made for them here. Okay, it was only tinned stuff, but she managed to do something to it, he always knew when she had been working in the kitchen.

He had almost finished when she finally came into the canteen; she had a way of walking: to him it screamed out that she needed touch, to be held… anything, so he liked to think, anyway.

‘Fifteen minutes late’, he said. She sat down opposite and cut him a wry look.

‘Were you worried?’

He wasn’t, he said, ‘I knew you were in the kitchen, I could taste it in the beans’, he paused to finish last spoonful, savouring it and smacking his lips, ‘I always can’.

‘Carl…,’ she said his name with a smile — not just on her face, but in the way she said it; and the way she said it made him just want to grab her right there and then. Every. Damn. Time.

‘…you know it’s only beans’, she said, ‘I don’t do anything.’ It was like a dance they did; a new courting ritual for the new world, maybe?

He was all ready to take his step, grab her by the waist and spin her when someone shouted across the canteen.

‘Wagon!?’, he grimaced, ‘Yeh?’

‘Tower!’, was the cry, ‘NOW!