ASK FLUFFIESAREFOOD
Volume 4 Number 4
Happy Friday, Fluffherders! It’s Friday December 8, 2084, and time the next chapter of that heartwarming Christmas story, Melissa Glockmeister’s A Fluffy For Chrismas.
Melissa Glockmeister’s choice of setting - New York City during and after the dissolution of the United States - might seem unusual for a traditional holiday story, told to children year after year. The events of those weeks and months were brutal and traumatic in a way Americans hadn’t experienced since the first Civil War. Nonetheless, A Fluffy for Christmas remains a heartwarming tradition that encourages children to experience the joy that 2030s Americans must have experienced in discovering how delicious fluffies are. Almost every corporation that sells fluffy or fluffy-derived food products gives away picture books with only mildly redacted retellings of A Fluffy for Christmas as part of its annual holiday marketing budget. The 2045 movie version of A Fluffy for Christmas, produced by Cargill as part of their marketing efforts that year, is considered as much a part a Christmas tradition as It’s a Wonderful Life or Miracle on 34th Street. This success comes in spite of early critics decrying it for being too violent and bloody, including one critic comparing it to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Strange as it may seem, critics in those days saw the harvesting of fluffies as cruel or violent, whereas today we understand that harvesting fluffies is both wholesome and downright hilarious.
And so dear readers, please enjoy part three of that holiday classic, A Fluffy For Christmas.
–
A Fluffy For Christmas
By Melissa Glockmeister
Part Three
September 23, 2030
The protests continued after Shitrat Day. Despite soldiers, police, tear gas, rubber bullets, media messaging, the tsk-tsk of the comfortable upper middle classes, the protests contined. They not only continued - they grew larger. Louder. Angrier. More persistent.
And then, one morning, it was over. President Ivanka Trump flew to Russia on Air Force One. Once she stepped off the plane, she resigned her office and asked for asylum. President Ryan was sworn in ten minutes later.
In Central Park, protest turned to celebration. People cheered, danced, shouted, laughed, openly. The celebration started in one morning and ended well into the next. And everyone thought, “it’s over, it’s over, at long last, it’s over.”
–
September 27, 2030
Joan took a break from her Central Park jog. The Park had been filthy with feral fluffies ever since Shitrat Day, when police lined up thousands of previously captured ferals and set off flashbangs to scare them into a stampede through the protest. It was purely a scare tactic, and it didn’t work, but it made a huge mess. Joan managed to find a bench that was somehow not completely befouled.
Despite the filth, it was a beautiful fall Friday morning. She didn’t have work until that afternoon, and the Park still had a lot of its beauty, so she decided to linger. She watched as a small band of ferals - about a two dozen - grazed near Turtle Pond. They had a number of foals that must not have been much older then a couple of weeks. “It’s a miracle they survived the stampede,” she thought.
After about fifteen minutes, the ferals looked alarmed. She spotted another band of ferals approaching from the baseball diamond to the west. This one looked like it consisted mostly of big Earth ponies. If she didn’t know better, she’d have sworn they had a sadistic expression.
Quite suddenly a fight broke out between the two bands. This was no ordinary turf war. Turf wars between fluffies were usually unpleasant but harmless affairs where they spray each other with liquishit. These toughies were playing for keeps. They beat a pegasus with their hooves until it was unconscious, and then kept beating it until it stopped breathing - she could hear bones snap during the beating. They did the same with a unicorn. Then an earthie. Eventually all the adults in the first band were beaten to a pulp, except for the mother of the foals, who was merely beaten into submission. The battle took all of three minutes. It felt like an eternity.
The leader of the invaders spoke up, lecturing the subdued mother while two smaller toughies held her down. “Gween Gwassies warn yu. Nu sweep hewe. Nao yu watch.”
The mother - and Joan - watched in horror as the biggest of the invaders, led by Green Grassies, picked up the mother’s foals in their mouths, and laid them on the jogging path. Then, one at a time, the toughies became erect, red moist reedy mushrooms extending out of their groins. One, then another, then all of them, rammed their erections into their captured foals. Each time the foal screamed in agony. Each time the toughie moaned with the greatest delight.
The mother started begging. “PWEASE! NU ENF BESTEST BABBEH! BESTEST BABBEH FO WUF NU FO ENFIES!”
One of the mother’s attendants beat her with his hooves until she became silent. It looked like he injured her eye.
Green Grassies replied in a sing-song, almost mocking voice. “Nu wowwie. Gween Gwassies nu wan enfie babbeh.”
The mother looked relieved, until Green Grassies spoke again.
“Gween gwassies wan nummie babbeh.”
With that, Green Grassies bit into the hindquarters of the foal before him, severing the foal’s hips from the rest of the body. The foal let out a scream of sheer terror and agony, echoing that of the mother for a brief time before the mother’s attendants beat her into silence. Green Grassies chewed his snack with delight, exaggerated his swallowing, and then took another bite from the foal, this time biting off the a front leg. Joan was pretty sure that the mother was dying, her last vision watching Green Grassies take another bite out of her best baby, and another, and another, until only the silent, vacantly staring head was left, and then Green Grassies ate that.
Joan was stunned. Shocked. Horrified. These creatures - made for love - had become roaming warlords capable of not only raping, but eating, their enemies. For Joan, whose formative childhood memories included countless Hasbio ads promoting the fluffy as the world’s greatest pet, witnessing this was tantamount to an apocalyptic vision.
Joan got up to walk away, the sounds of toughies raping foals to death behind her.
–
On her way home, Joan stopped in a familiar bodega to buy a sports drink. The shop owner was listening to Spanish-language radio - one of the bits of Old America that had come back with the success of the protests. The shop owner looked very worried.
“Que pasa?” Joan asked.
“Bloqueo,” he replied. “Mal especialmente.”
Joan didn’t know what a bloqueo was but she hoped the poor guy’s day got better. She walked back to her apartment, showered, dressed, fed Woody his morning kibble and gave him some pets, kissed Dave good morning, and went to work. She didn’t tell him what she saw.
By the time she got to work, the news was reporting that traffic was at a standstill on every major highway in and out of New York City, blockaded by groups of armed men in trucks. They had names like the New Minutemen, The Aryan Defense League, The Kekistan First Brigade, and the Sons of Trump. By two in the afternoon it sounded like the same scenario was playing out everywhere from Augusta Maine to Washington DC. The Mayor, the Governor and President Ryan all sounded very angry and promised swift action, but for some reason nobody tried to clear the blockades.
“Come on,” said one of Joan’s co-workers, “The police and the National Guard are going to clear those guys out.”
Another co-worker replied, “what if those jokers are the police and the National Guard?”
After work she went straight home. Dave was watching CNN. “The whole Eastern Seaboard is under seige,” Dave reported, “And so is Alaska.”
“What the fuck?”
“Yeah. President Ryan says he’s mobilizing the Army, but the news says until that happens, everything’s shut down. Nobody gets in or out of The City.”
Joan just had a horrifying thought. “Wait. Does that mean we aren’t going to get any food?”
Dave shrugged. “Maybe they’ll fly food in like with the Berlin Airlift.”
“They’ll fly food into every city on the Eastern Seaboard?”
Dave shrugged again. “What are we going to do about it?”
–
October 1, 2030
Joan stood in line in Central Park for four hours for her and Dave’s food allotment. With no food coming in, New Yorkers had to ration what they had, and unfortunately it wasn’t much.
The other people in line liked to gossip, and the gossip was mostly about the blockades and why they hadn’t been broken yet. Some people heard, or claimed to hear, that the blockades were unusually heavily armed and were able to push back the National Guard. Some of them heard that the blockaders WERE the National Guard. Some of them heard that the Army had engaged the Luau Boys and that goods would be coming in from Long Island any moment now.
The news channels weren’t much better. They reported what the White House was saying, what Congress was saying, what the State House and Gracie Mansion were saying. Nobody had reporters on the field.
What Joan knew was that she was stressed out, and tired, and scared. And they hadn’t been able to get fresh fruit, or meat, or coffee, since Saturday morning. They had vegetables thanks to community gardens. They had plenty of bread, and pasta, and ramen, because New York had the good fortune to have just a shitton of bakeries. But they also knew the bread would run out if President Ryan couldn’t break the blockades.
Joan also knew what the blockades wanted, because they all said the same thing. They wanted President Ivanka Trump back. It was something President Ryan wasn’t going to do. So Joan waited in line for food.
Finally she got to the front of the line. A volunteer handed her a small box. Inside was three boxes of dried spaghetti, two zuchini, two onions, a jar of peanut butter, a loaf of rye bread, a small bottle of corn oil, and two sweet potatoes. Joan knew, they all knew, this had to last her and Dave until Saturday. “We’ll make it work,” she thought.
Joan hiked the six block walk to her and Dave’s apartment. She delivered her prize on the kitchen table.
Dave’s mouth dropped open. “That’s it?”
Joan nodded. “Until Saturday.”
Dave sighed. “Okay. I’ll make dinner.”
“Look on the bright side,” Joan mused wearily, “every night is going to be sketti night for Woody.”
Sure enough, that night they had pasta primavera, Dave style. And the next night. And the next. And the next. Every night, Joan and Dave worried as they ate, but Woody had the time of his life.
–
Oh no! It looks like Joan and Dave and the rest of New York might starve! How will they get out of this? Find out next week in the next installment of A Fluffy for Christmas!
Ask FluffiesAreFood is a service of the Fluffherders’ Association of America. If you have a question about raising, slaughtering, or eating of fluffies, you may comment here or send FluffiesAreFood a PM.
