“NIGHT MEAT”

by MAX BOOTH III

There is no such thing as night meat. That’s the first lie they try to teach you after leaving the wall. You never had any night meat. It doesn’t exist. Forget about it. But of course you can’t. Night meat is not something to be forgotten. One taste and it forever changes your DNA. It makes you see the universe in a new and exciting way—such as, what if there was a universe with night meat in it? Which there most certainly is, despite what they try to teach you after leaving the wall. In fact, it’s the universe you currently find yourself living in. This is the night meat universe, and nothing anybody else says will make that untrue.

But they don’t want you to remember that. They don’t want you to seek it out now that you’ve left the wall. They don’t want you to track down the source. Because the thing about night meat, if you remember, is you never quite knew what kind of meat, specifically, it was, besides “night.” Which tells you nothing—or maybe it tells you everything. What is night, exactly, and how do you extract meat from it? Is it meant to be slaughtered? Skinned and gutted? You’ve never gutted anything in your life. Back when you lived in the wall, violence wasn’t a concept any of us were familiar with. Death was not a thing we considered.

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