Scrame

“At the very end, I think he looked up”

“And that was it?”

“That was it, an awful croaking sound — a death rattle maybe”

“You’d know it if you heard it”

“Well, yeah, it had to be that, then, I just don’t think I ever saw anybody die before.”

The first man was a large, roly-poly type, he was down on one knee seemed to be choking the words out. The other man was tall and slender, dressed in an all black suit, expressionless, mouth barely moving.

“That shit’ll kill you, i’ve seen it before.”

The tall man slowly pulled a clenched fist holding a stick of butter that had wilted brown.

“This … is destroying society.”

It was, of course, the near future. The major American cities had devolved into tribalism, driven largely by fast food and cheap cigarettes, the major metropolis’ in the developing world weren’t much better, but didn’t have the access to life-extending drugs and filtered cigarettes.

It seemed, at these times, that people were falling over left and right. Trashcans knocked over with the blemished, fetid corpses of the overdosed.

It was only a few years after the undergarment business ran out of X’s to add on to clothing, and wal-mart was forced to scrap the extremely large sizes to save shelf space, and just started stocking the clothes made for their chinese factory workers that made cheap televisions.

The result was an increase in skin issues, as poor, corpulent america stuffed itself into starving childrens clothes, and parking lot alteration groups sprang up overnight. People continued to grow with the butter, and swaddled themselves in meshes of shirts stitched quickly together. The aftermarket on wal-mart clothing quickly became an underground industry that began to run as an undercurrent through the rural US. Canada followed suit, but with more maple syrup.