I used to be vegan and a bad person
Now I am just a bad person
I used to tell everyone I was vegan
Now I tell them I am
No longer vegan
I used to check if the sauce was cream-based
I used to ask you not to butter the toast
I used to say I like tomato sauce more than animal-based sauces
I used to be a good liar
Now I am a slightly better liar
With more delicious condiments
Available to me
When I sleep the counter of days in which
I am not an arsehole returns to zero
It’s like groundhog day
Where I am not ethically opposed
To eating the lactations of the groundhog
Well I guess I am kind of opposed to it
Because it is disgusting
Because sucking on another animal’s tit
For culinary pleasure is kind of perverse
And also awful
Like cosplaying as a baby cow
A non-cute animal in a cute animal’s skin
Or like a furry enacting the last logical step of
Being a furry before dying alone
Lying prone under their drinking cow
Like a hand puppet with a dead person’s
Hand inside it
The furry having slightly less likelihood
Of having developed osteoporosis during
Their lifetime
Which is now over
They are matted and damp
Smelling faintly of sour milk
Their cow mother happy to be free but also confused and unable to move on and
sustain a happy life without them
Because maybe she loved her fucked-up furry baby-parasite too????
Or maybe she just has stockholm syndrome
And now she clops by herself to her cow house
To sit silently with a blank philosophical look
In her eyes
For all time
I think all of these things
But I am no longer vegan
Anyway
Eloise Grills is a writer, comics artist, zine maker and editor living in Melbourne. Her work has been featured in The Lifted Brow, Overland, CHART Collective, The Age and many other places. She was a 2016 recipient of a Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellowship for Illustrators. She tweets and grams from @grillzoid
