Ice Cream (excerpt)
Profile: Demi McKinsey
Kilojoule Allowance: 3500 + 100 extra granted from output
The end of the world tasted like strawberry ice cream.
It takes an approximate average of twenty-three minutes for the body to realize what it has been subjected to, or that is to say, what it has been poisoned with, but it takes considerably less time for the brain to realize the crime that has been committed. So before she even felt the ice cream inside of her, Demi reacted. She opened her mouth.
At first, no sound came out. No ice cream came out. Then the scream found its way past the horror, and it was so goddamn loud that she couldn’t believe it came from her, couldn’t believe that the glass wall wasn’t shattering. In a way, she wished it did. That way the kitchen would be destroyed, and then she would never have to step foot in this miserable place again. What was she doing in the kitchen three hours before dinnertime?
Right. Out of the corner of her eyes and through her tears she saw a beautifully pink tub of strawberry ice cream, except she had savagely ruined the milky expanse that was its smooth surface. She wished she could fix it, go back just two minutes. That was all it took really, for the world to end.
Out of the other corner of her eyes, she saw her mother and father and little sister. Her scream died out when something like a cotton ball was stuffed into her mouth.
“Oh my god,” her father, the perpetrator, said.
Demi let him pry the spoon from her fist.
“Honey,” her mother said, staring at the ice cream. “Where did you get this?”
Her pretty little mother, who was now looking at her with a look of fear, or was that disgust? What did she do? Well, she found a tub of strawberry ice cream in the fridge; if only that was all she did.
Her little sister’s voice piped up. “Demi ate that? Wow.”
Her father’s incredulity, unfortunately, was not in the same vein of wonder, and a little too roughly, he spun her around and unzipped her shirt to check her back.
“It hasn’t caught up yet,” her father breathed a sigh of relief.
“Her system hasn’t processed the ice cream.”
“How long until?”
“Soon enough,” her father groaned. “We’re going to have to sedate her while we figure out what to do.”
“What’s going to happen to Demi?” Cora asked, from where she stood in the doorway.
“Nothing, sweetie,” he answered. “Mags, could you take Cora upstairs?”
“I'm fifteen,” Cora said, crossing her arms.
“That you are,” he said.
Demi took the cotton ball out of her mouth and resumed screaming.
Profile: Cora McKinsey
Iron: Abnormal Low 15 ug/dL
RBC: Abnormal Low 3.22x10(6)/uL
Cora didn’t know why she asked. She knew what was going to happen to Demi. In the case one’s consumption levels exceeded the daily allowance, the violator would have to go to the hospital and get the body pumped. Intense gastric and intestinal suction and all sorts of things going through the guts. But she couldn’t imagine anything that vicious happening to her sister.
“Your sister just had . . . a binge,” Mom said. “She’ll be okay though.”
“Is she going to be taken away?”
“No!” Mom said, a bit too loudly, given that it was just the two of them in the upstairs hallway. She calmed down. “No. The alarms haven’t rung, so Dad’s going to fix this before the hospital is notified.”
“Okay,” she agreed, not sure how Dad was going to fix anything with his daughters if he only worked with computers.
“But she didn’t even have that much.”
“She shouldn’t have eaten any in the first place, honey.”
“Then why was it in our house?”
“I don’t know.”
“What does it taste like? Why did Demi eat it? Isn't it, like, way too sweet?”
“Stop asking so much!” Mom snapped, pushing Cora into her room. Then she took a deep breath and rubbed Cora’s shoulder in apology. “Demi’s going to be okay. No need to worry about her.”
“But—”
“Just worry about yourself. The school said that they’ve noticed you gained weight.”
Cora flushed, but it was true; so she went to her desk and opened one of her textbooks just as Mom closed the door.
Maybe she wasn’t as beautiful or as small as darling Demi, but she was undeniably smarter and more obedient. And if you asked her to recite any of the Mindfulness Mantras, she could, word for word. Too bad intellect didn’t quite translate over to appearance. She didn’t need the teachers at school to tell her that she was looking a bit . . . big. Good discipline shows on the outside—she wished. And I am in control of my mouth. She laughed at that one, though, because she wasn’t really, not when it came to her mouth. Even as a child, she would bite her own palm when Mom or Dad wouldn’t let her eat, simply because her teeth just needed to gnaw at something.
But that was the furthest she went. Cora never, ever broke any of the rules. It just wasn’t fair that everything just showed up on her body. Unlike Demi, who . . .
Well, even if her parents hadn’t seen it happening, Cora did; thinking about it, however, only made her stomach hurt. Maybe that was just hunger. Did gastric suction hurt more than this?
There was still two hours to go before dinner, so Cora reached for her water bottle and swallowed a few gulps before repeating Mantra 4, her favorite. Hunger is sin leaving the body.
Profile: Reade McKinsey
Height: 185.42 cm
Weight: 8 stones, 8 pounds
His wife would surely demand a divorce if she ever found out, but his foremost thought was who in the world had the audacity to bring ice cream into the house? He couldn’t say he was mad; but really, he felt betrayed. If word were to get out that there was ice cream! of all things contraband! in the house of a managing officer!
But luckily, that thought was for but an instant, and soon, he was all business. He had to save his daughter, or at least protect her from being detected. He inserted a glass tube into the metal syringe in the first aid kit, and when Demi’s scream died out and she fell limp against him, he hurried to get things sorted out. Still on the floor, he turned her body so that she leaned forward against the wall, and by the time Mags was crouched next to him again, he had hacked into his eldest daughter’s Intake Log, luminescent figures running a long, comprehensive list down her back.
“The kilojoule count,” he inhaled as he watched the number shoot up past the five-thousand mark.
“Make it stop,” his wife said, pressing her fingers into the number, willing it to disappear. “Reade, can’t you do something?”
“I did,” he frowned. “This sedative slows down her body processes. She’s not registering her binge as quickly. Damn.”
For a girl of Demi’s height and body type, if the number even hit six-thousand, the doctors would be notified. An act of grace, the number tapered and stopped a mere 300 hundred below it.
“Oh! Thank god she ate so little this morning.” They could always count on Demi to undershoot.
“It’s going to wear off in two hours,” Reade said seriously. “We have to figure out how to get the ice cream out of her system before then.”
Mags understood what he was saying almost immediately.
But she hesitated.
“Demi’s always had a fear of gagging.”
“I have some medication that will induce it. It’ll come up quickly.”
She bit her lip. “Can’t we just put her on restriction?”
Reade looked down at his beautiful wife. So small, so petite, like a little bird. And so worried. Demi took after her.
“Honey,” he began, then cleared his throat. “That was a lot of kilojoules binged in one go. It would require restriction for the next two days.”
“That sounds better than your idea,” she said. “I’ve done it for three days once.”
The number on Demi’s back crept up two digits, and Reade pointedly looked at his wife. “We don’t have two days. Not even one.”
The two of them sat there with bated breath, like little children, with an even littler child between them. Maybe he could find some way to reconfigure it so the officers would think that his daughter consumed a lot of strawberries and drank a lot of milk. But what would he say about all the added sugar? He struggled to calculate how many grams he would have to account for.
Mags’ thin arms and delicate hands extended towards their daughter, wrapping themselves around her carefully. Reade couldn’t tell which one was going to break.
“At least let her wake up naturally. Let her enjoy her ice cream.”
Reade let a few moments pass before he knew he had to ask. As a husband, he shouldn’t have; but as an officer, he was going to.
“Margarette,” he said, watching her back stiffen. “Did you buy the strawberry ice cream?”
Profile: Margarette Yue-McKinsey
Body-Mass Index (McKinsey-Allan Model): 15.6
She remembered rice.
She was not yet fifty, yet she couldn’t believe that three decades were all that separated then and now. Her name had been two syllables long, not seven, and she had been a world apart from this savage country and Reade. In that world, she knew she ate many things, but there was nothing she remembered as fondly as rice. She kept it a secret from her family. Seven hundred kJ for a meagre quarter cup—not worth it. And god forbid she thought of the carbohydrates. She was changed now, a better woman, and she didn’t feel a desire to go back to that world.
And if Reade found out that she still thought of these things . . . that was almost as bad as cheating. It was cheating—emotionally.
But there were nights she dreamt of a table, of ceramic plates laden with . . . laden with life. Like fish, a whole fish with the head and eyes and mouth slightly agape, topped with long green onions and finished off with oil so hot the skin of the fish cooked a second time and gleamed an iridescent black pearl. Or thick slices of pork belly stewed so long that they shrunk to half their size, marinated in its sweet braising sauce. The white layer of fat on the meat would quiver if you poked at it, and she quivered thinking about how she used to eat it. And the bulbous dark green vegetables; sliced down the middle and quartered so that their hearts revealed neat layers; the ugly bitter melon that had the green, warty skin of a witch; stir-fried with beaten egg—why, she could probably eat that now, if she took away the egg yolk!
Then inevitably she would wake up, and when she did, she folded away from Reade and lost everything, all over again.
And she was the mother now. With Demi limp in her arms, Margarette couldn’t shake the feeling that in between her being a daughter and being a mother something had gone terribly wrong. Thoughts like these were harder to swallow and tamp down. Like when she looked at her daughters and saw wild, animalistic looks in their eyes; when she realized that Cora was probably never going to begin menstruating; when she looked at Demi’s grown-up body and her own childlike one and realized there was no difference between the two—it occurred to her then that maybe Reade only married her for the physiological advantages she would’ve passed down to their daughters. Asians, after all, were rumored to be genetically blessed, "naturally smaller." She scrunched her face and thought of Cora.