The Fat Man and the Poisonous Chicken Breast

I’m driving to work and I think I’m going puke…no, I know I’m going to puke. Wave of nausea. Stomach tightening. Eyes watering…spasm subsiding. I feel awful. I ate a chicken breast for breakfast and I don’t think it was cooked enough. No, I know it wasn’t cooked enough. Chicken Sushi anyone? I’m pretty sure I’m going to die…some day. Then again…

I roll down my window and lean my head out sucking in big gulps of car exhaust and tiny bits of oxygen. This isn’t helping. It feels like there is a weasel with cleats on in my stomach and he is—cutting, burrowing, waltzing…

Focus on something else, I tell myself and so I watch the traffic coming at me. A garbage truck. A mini-van mom and five rug rats. A police cruiser and a donut inspector inside. STOP. What I see next is startling enough for me to forget the poisonous chicken breast eating away at my gut. In a tiny SUV, with no clothing on, I see a morbidly obese man; French fries in his chest hair. He is in fact so large that he his fat has been pressed into the square shape of the driver’s side compartment. Pressing up against the glass, it looks as if some mad scientist has grown a skin culture in an aquarium and it has been mixed with some super growing agent and it is pressing, threatening to crash through.

I wonder why this man is driving naked and it occurs to me that they don’t make clothes big enough to accommodate his sizeable bulk. That he has outgrown his pants, his shirts and his underwear. He can now only wear his SUV and soon he will outgrow that. Where does a human being this big go when he dies, I wonder. And the answer came rather quickly: to those big Golden Arches in the sky. Yes, McDonalds.

I pulled over next to a bus stop, got out and puked--the poisonous chicken breast mocking me. I haven’t eaten since.