Restaurantz

"The problem with humanity," said my friend, a fork hovering below his mouth, "is that what was once abhorrent usually, over time, comes to be considered absolutely fine, normal behaviour."

His mouth clamped around the fork. I nodded and, mouth full, grunted assent. He continued;

"After it happens, they're not even human anymore. It's a kindness to be released from that, and with the way the world is now, with no farms, no animals, we still need to eat and they're technically just meat after all."

He lifted the fork to his mouth again.

"Still, having said that, I can't pretend...I just really, really like the taste of zombie flesh."

This was a piece of work (the very first piece of work in fact) that I did on my creative writing degree. We were tasked with writing a piece of flash fiction, that is to say, a piece of fiction that is very short. We were asked to stick to 101 words (I was 9 over, which isn't too terrible) and given a list of story prompts to work with. Stuff like "I saw her at the bus stop" and "I had a dog when I was child" and who knows what else because it was just really banal stuff, so instead I decided to write about a restaurant after the advent of a zombie apocalypse, because come on, you know me. I used zombies but, in a way, it's actually about the dehumanisation of people. Zombies in literature/film are usually represented as being mindless and if you don't take care and get attacked by them, you can find yourself, unwillingly, joining their cause  and becoming mindless yourself. In that way, zombies are the perfect villain because they can represent whatever new threat you need them to be. They can be communist, foreign, homosexual, left wing, right wing, whatever ideology because they are literally, a grey canvas that is held up to an issue as an "us" vs "them" symbol.

So, with that in mind,I encourage people to dissect this piece of work (though I know you won't, because who has time for that right! *surprise me is what I'm saying*), even though I completed it in a very short amount of time, a lot of thought went into the making of this.

Post script: I apologise for the title, it's Restaurantz because I imagine it to be name of a chain of restaurant in post-apocalyptia that serves zombie flesh to its customers...hence Restaurant Z....yeah...it's also a play on the substitution "s" for "z" to seem young and hip, instead of restaurants, restaurantz...