Fred Aiken Writing

“Miss, is this correct?”

“Are you talking about our menu? Because if so, then yes, I’m afraid it is.”

“All you serve is beans?”

“Well, yes, that’s why the owners call this The Beanery.”

“How can you possibly stay in business?”

“I don’t know. I’m just a server here. But I imagine because beans are so cheap the profit margins can remain relatively high.”

“Well, do you guys do anything unique with y’all’s beans?”

“We certainly specialize in cooking them in some unique manners. I guess beans are typically thought of as a side dish, and we like to make them a focal point here at The Beanery. We can do anything from a black bean quinoa salad to a mediterranean chickpea gyro, though my favorite is the tikka masala cannellini bean casserole.”

“So, essentially, it seems like you replace the protein of staple dishes from these different cultures and appropriate beans to them?”

“I guess if you wanted to simplify what we do, then certainly it can seem that way.”

“Well, I guess I’ll try your favorite dish, the tikka masala.”

“Awesome. You won’t be disappointed.”

“Yeah, probably not. I certainly didn’t anticipate a truck stop being so niche, though.”

“I get that a lot. But I think the owners have been here for nearly forty years. I think they just sort of noticed a trend that a lot of their truck-stop patrons were ordering more and more beans. Maybe it was because of the economy tanking, and all people could afford was beans, or maybe their patrons’ tastes were simple changing more and more gradually to the point that they completely redid their name, concept, and, well, everything.”

“Yeah, you think so? Huh. Well, what was the original name of this place?”

“All Things Kidney.”

Bobby’s left premolar came in when he was seven months old, and from the day it started to crown its way out of his gums it caused Bobby nothing but problems. It started with a toothache, which developed into the tooth’s consciousness, and the moment Bobby’s left premolar became conscious of its existence it realized that all it wanted to do was eat. 

At first, the tooth simply asked for food once a day. And really, all things considered, it wasn’t all that much food. Just a little here and there. Though for whatever reason, Bobby and his left premolar never agreed on what they should eat. His premolar wanted more umami vegetables with a  savory taste, while Bobby typically wanted to eat more and more sweets and his idea of a vegetable was ketchup.

All things considered, though, Bobby’s premolar and him coexisted fairly peacefully for years on end, with only the occasional bother. The consciousness of the tooth led it to painstakingly warn Bobby whenever another tooth was coming down with a cavity by biting down into his gums as hard as possible. Bobby was never left alone for all too long with some form of reminder from his premolar about taking care of his teeth. In a way, when Bobby grew older, he became more appreciative of his tooth that reminded him to take care of all of his teeth. In fact, even Bobby’s dentist made mention that he had perhaps some of the most well taken care of teeth ever seen.

It was around the time that Bobby turned forty and started having a mid-life crisis that his left premolar did as well. But the mid-life crisis of a tooth looks vastly different than that of a grown man. Instead of being able to go out and buy a whole bunch of fancy material things, Bobby’s left premolar began to eat more and more food, diverting it away from Bobby’s stomach. Eventually, the tooth grew to three times the size of all the rest of Bobby’s teeth. It became so bad that some of the surrounding teeth around Bobby’s left premolar began to fall out. 

Bobby noticed that his entire mouth was being consumed by one single tooth. He went to his dentist to perhaps get it removed. His dentist stated that he didn’t have the necessary equipment to remove a tooth of that size. His left premolar had taken the center stage of Bobby’s mouth, and there now remained very little other teeth. At times it seemed even difficult to breathe, and because the tooth had rediverted all of Bobby’s food to itself rather than allowing it to go into his stomach, Bobby had become frail and skinny due to his lack of sustenance. 

He pleaded with his dentist to do something, since at that point Bobby had become convinced that his tooth wanted him dead. Of course his dentist reasoned with Bobby that if he died, then so would his tooth, so that would be a preposterous conclusion.

Yet, Bobby insisted, his tooth perhaps did not care. Maybe it felt as if it had suffered enough in this life, and this was his left premolar’s attempt to die along with its host. 

His dentist warned that if he removed such a large tooth it may lead to massive blood loss since the tooth had clung to the roots of so much of his gums. Like the dentist continuously liked to remind Bobby, he had never actually dealt with a tooth of that magnitude or consciousness, so it might go disastrously wrong despite their intent.

But Bobby said he didn’t care, he claimed that nothing could be worse than being consumed by his own tooth.

The procedure was fairly painless due to the sheer amount of novacaine that the dentist administered. In fact, after all was said and done, the Board of Ethical Dentistry claimed that Bobby probably would have survived the procedure if he had been so knocked out on novacaine, since it was determined that he had died of an overdose. The dentist’s reply was simply that he had never dealt with such a large tooth that he could not have possibly have known. He assumed that the larger the tooth, the larger dose of numbing drugs needed to ensure his patient’s safety and comfort.

None of the other deers knew why Nigel’s antlers led them where they needed to go. All they knew as a community was that if they were going to make it as a species, then they were going to have to listen to the oration and soap boxes that came from Nigel’s antlers. 

All the other deers hated Nigel, though. They each thought that he was a dick, and whenever they as a group did not need to hang around him they typically found any and all excuses to not be anywhere near Nigel. 

No one knew exactly who mentioned it first, it was one of those things in which one deer sort of blurts out something, and the idea takes on a life of its own, but someone mentioned the possibility of taking Nigel’s antlers off of him. That was all he was good for, nothing else, and so it stood to reason that the one deer within their community that unequivocally bothered all the other deer, would need to be killed, and his antlers harvested for the survival of their community. A council of elder deers pondered on the question for many moons in the privacy of the woods, since there were many different voices to be heard.

One deer elder stated posited that each deer life was sacred, and they as a species should never want to openly try to kill one of their own. He quickly was ignored.

Another elder suggested that in order to keep their hands clean, they could simply lead Nigel to a part of the woods where they knew hunters liked to hang out, and they would let nature take its course. They would mourn Nigel’s death, and openly wonder why he had chosen to graze where hunters gathered. But then an elder pointed out that hunters liked to collect deers’ antlers as trophies, and they might never see Nigel’s antlers again if they were to be poached by hunters.

No, they decided that they would need to be the ones to kill Nigel. As gruesome as the idea was, the deer elders had no other choice if they were going to be able to collect Nigel’s antlers after he died. They each whispered into each others’ ears their ideas about how to go about killing Nigel so that no one knew specifically whose idea had been chosen, so that when it played out and Nigel was dead, and Nigel’s family asked what had happened, no one elder could come back and say specifically who it had been that had suggested how to kill Nigel.

They settled on ramming Nigel off of a cliff. It seemed to be the cleanest way to go about it, as well as the safest method to ensure that it was Nigel and only Nigel that died. And so they went about enlisting youthful, verile deers that could effectively ram Nigel down a cliff to his death. Each day they would send a young deer out with Nigel to scavenge and gather various berries and acorns and the like, all with the expressed purpose of finding a cliff and pushing Nigel to his death. 

When Nigel returned without his young companion, the elders asked what happened, to which Nigel responded that he had no idea. For some reason his antlers told him to go really fast all of a sudden, and then he noticed the young fawn running behind him to his death. He assumed the younger deer was merely suicidal, and there was nothing to be done. The same sort of incident occurred over twenty-three times before the elder deers realized they would never be able to kill Nigel. Instead, they would have to learn to live with him if they were going to utilize his antlers to guide them from danger.