The Brexit Balderdash Meat Carnival

You take a half-hearted bite of the dried meat, a vaguely rancid flavour hitting the back of your mouth as it goes down, with a good few particles of dust. It barely registers. A jolt of electricity might perhaps, straight to the nervous system. It feels like ten wretched, misbegotten years of dragging your feet down this dust trail without any sense of movement or change. In truth it’s been far less than that, but you severely doubt anyone would be around to question you regardless.

Almost as if in answer to that thought a fuzzy humanoid form seems to materialise ahead of you, though you know better than to trust your eyes at this point, reaching for your water bottle and taking a conservative swig. The form gradually becomes more defined, until, like a pallid nightmare, a dying man looks back at you through hooded eyes, all cracked parchment skin, a husk, ready to crumble at the slightest invocation. He lies, propped against a rusty pipe, perhaps a vision of flickering hope, more likely just another failed attempt at reconciliation, the residue of an experiment in living.

As you approach him, he attempts to raise his arm but cannot, and it flops down in resignation. You have a hand on your water bottle, both in anticipation that he may be deceiving you and that he may ask for help. You draw close and it becomes clear that he is not in a good way, oscillating between the living and the dead at this point he is in a delirium, even if he is still cogent enough to recognise you as another human face. He looks you straight in the eyes, and in his you find the milky whites faded, strata of rock leading to a central point, covered in fleshy membrane. As he looks at you his lips part, with great effort, and great pain. A wheezing croaking sound at first, but eventually words, he slowly asks you a question.

“what … is … your … opinion …”

He pauses, continuing is a difficulty. In this moment you are baffled, but wait to hear the end, part of you hopes he’ll pass out before that happens.

“… on … Brexit?”

As soon as this word passes his lips you stand back and look at him with horror and pity. What on earth could possibly lead a man to the point where such concerns override his own survival? What unearthly possession must take hold, what hellish program? You suspect he is one of the acolytes, abandoned by their own gods, stripped of rank and denied meaning during the aftermath in which you are now a traveller. His face suddenly takes the form of an emaciated dog, caught between a bark and a growl, drooling over the shuddering artillery blasted concrete beneath, eyes rotating in their sockets as he starts to choke on something. He falls to the side coughing manically, clawing pathetically at the ground, staring wide-eyed ahead in panic.

Something emerges from his gullet, hitting the ground with a muted thud, covered in drool and slime. He drops, lifeless, and disintegrates, drifting apart in the wind. Stepping closer you begin to ascertain something, a smell, the awful, acrid smell of rancid meat overtakes the senses. It’s a slab of rotten flesh lying there covered in grey dust. a small note is stapled to it, barely readable and soaked in slime. IN HERE it reads, and with certain degree of sheer disgust you realise it’s telling you something is IN the meat. You close your eyes and pick up the degraded brown-green slab, holding it at arms length and thrusting your other hand into it until you find something there.. something hard, a stone? You extract it, little pieces of rotten meat falling off its smooth surface.

There are words on the stone, scratched into it roughly and very small. You squint but can barely make it out. Taking out a handkerchief you wipe first your hands and then the stone, an actually rather boring granite pebble. Holding it up the light you make out the words, written in a hurried and simple script. With dawning confusion and exasperation, you intone the words as they stand; “Brexit means Brexit”. What on earth? You ask yourself under your breath, trying to recall what this is supposed to mean, what it refers to. This word, Brexit. Ugly, sticks in the mouth like the an acrid aftertaste. You dimly remember reference to it, but these memories slide away from you as soon as they appear contorting out of vision constantly. All that returns to you is the slab of rotten meat, now lying distended on the ground before you as you investigate the stone.

Wait, the meat is reconstructing itself. Slimy, discoloured tendrils slither together, weaving into a solid sickening wall of fibrous mulch. It keeps going, extending and duplicating, a crude meat figure emerges, a poorly formed humanoid meat man standing in front of you, gulping up gobbets of gristle and unidentified matter. The rotten meat golem attempts to speak but cannot, only succeeding in rasping strange noises. You back away slowly in fear, the meat man advances; for what purpose? It is a ramshackle being, falling apart as it walks, but the sheer sight of it flares up as panic, compelling you to run, despite your utter despondency, your lack of a reason to care, you sprint away from the creature as it walks towards you, juices leaking onto the ground, creating channels in the layers of dust…

As you run, you spot a building to your right, a particularly run down construction, barely a shed, and slip through the door, immediately on the look-out, still hearing the slurping sound behind you somewhere as the golem drags himself with increasing speed towards you. Did he spot you? To your dismay a poorly formed hand immediately reaches around the door, flailing for a grip, and you back towards the corner of the structure, thinking of ways to avoid the meat man without directly engaging it, the door opens and two newly formed eyes gleam from crude sockets, barely holding their position and likely struggling to get even a solid visual. It walks, assuredly this time, towards you and grabs you by the arm, dragging you painfully out of the building. You look around and let out a muted cry.

Obelisks of meat tower over the landscape, barely holding together, slowly pulsating and expanding, tentacular limbs grasp onto each other forming lattices up which more meat climbs, forming heads, hands, shoulders, hearts, disembodied pieces of people and animals growing from the meat walls. Vaguely, a low chanting is heard, an unintelligible language amidst which the word rings out loud and clear, that awful word; Brexit. You see a circle, people dressed in meat, drinking from cups made of meat, enjoying themselves, a hideous carnival of meat. They speak some kind of strange patchwork of language, words known and unknown hastily glued in place and splurged out into space. Meat juice pools on the ground, and where it runs up sprout new forms, new walls and structures, but of meat. They instantly collapse into vast piles of rancid, awful meaty nothingness.

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