All You Need Is Kill

I’d watched all this 159 times. But since I’d been caught in the loop, I hardly noticed a thing about the world outside my own head that didn’t directly pertain to my way out of here. I sat quietly in a small, gray cafeteria, devoid of sound, methodically shoveling tasteless food into my mouth.

Even if tomorrow’s battle went well, some of the soldiers here wouldn’t be coming back. If it went poorly, even fewer would return. Everybody knew it. The Armored Infantry was Santa Claus, and battle was our Christmas. What else for the elves to do on Christmas Eve but let their hair down and drink a little eggnog.

Rita Vrataski was sitting across from me, eating the same lunch for the 160th time. She examined her 160th umeboshi.

“What is this?”

“Umeboshi. It’s ume-people call it a plum, but it’s more like an apricot-dried in the sun, and then pickled. You eat it.”

“What’s it taste like?”

“Food is like war. You have to experience it for yourself.”

She poked at it two or three times with her chopsticks, then threw caution to the wind and put the whole thing in her mouth. The sourness hit her like a body blow from a heavyweight fighter and she doubled over, grabbing at her throat and chest. I could see the muscles twitching in her back.

“Like it?”

Rita worked her mouth without looking up. Her neck tensed. Something went flying out of her mouth-a perfectly clean pit skidded to a halt on her tray. She wiped the edges of her mouth as she gasped for breath.

“Not sour at all.”

“Not at this cafeteria,” I said. “Too many people from overseas. Go to a local place if you want the real stuff.”

I picked up the umeboshi from my tray and popped it into my mouth. I made a show of savoring the flavor. Truth be known, it was sour enough to twist my mouth as tight as a crab’s ass at low tide, but I wasn’t about to give her the satisfaction of seeing that.

“Pretty good.” I smacked my lips.

Rita stood, her mouth a stern line. She left me sitting at the table as she strode down the corridor between the tables, past throngs of soldiers, and up to the serving counter. There, Rachel spoke to a gorilla of a man who could reach up and touch the ceiling without so much as stretching-the same gorilla from the 4th whose fist my jaw had encountered all those loops ago. Beauty and the Beast were understandably surprised to see the subject of their conversation walk up to them. The entire cafeteria could sense that something was up; the conversations dimmed, and the banjo music stopped. Thank God.

Rita cleared her throat. “Could I get some dried pickled plums?”

“Umeboshi?”

“Yeah, those.”

“Well, sure, if you like.”

Rachel took out a small plate and started piling it with umeboshi from a large, plastic bucket.

“I don’t need the plate.”

“I’m sorry?”

“That thing you’re holding in your left hand. Yeah, the bucket. I’ll take all of them.”

“Um, people don’t usually eat that many at once,” Rachel said.

“That a problem?”

“No, I suppose not-”

“Thanks for your help.”

Bucket in hand, Rita walked back triumphantly. She thunked it down in the middle of the table right in front of me.

The container was about thirty centimeters across at the mouth- a tub big enough to serve about two hundred men, since nobody ever wanted more than one-packed halfway to the top with bright red umeboshi. Big enough to drown a small cat. The base of my tongue started to ache just looking at it. Rita went for her chopsticks.

She singled out one of the wrinkled, reddish fruit from the bucket and popped it into her mouth. She chewed. She swallowed. Out came the pit.

“Not sour at all.” Her eyes watered.

Rita passed the barrel to me with a shove. My turn. I picked out the smallest one I could find and put it in my mouth. I ate it and spit out the pit.

“Mine either.”

We were playing our own game of gastronomic chicken. The tips of Rita’s chopsticks quivered as she plunged them back into the barrel. She tried twice to pick up another umeboshi between them before she gave up and just skewered one on a single stick, lifting it to her mouth. The fruit trailed drops of pink liquid that stained the tray where they fell.

A crowd of onlookers had begun to gather around us. They watched in uneasy silence at first, but the excitement grew palpably with each pit spat out on the tray.

Sweat beaded on our skin like condensation on a hot day’s beer can. The revolting pile of half-chewed pits grew. Rachel was off to the side, watching with a worried smile. I spotted my friend from the 4th in the throng, too. He was having such a good time watching me suffer. Each time Rita or I put another ume in our mouths, a wave of heckling rippled through the crowd.

“Come on, pick up the pace!”

“No turnin’ back now, keep ’em poppin’!”

“You’re not gonna let this little girl show you up, are you?”

“Fuck, you think he can beat Rita? You’re crazy!”

“Eat! Eat! Eat!”