While Wilma took her seat and the other students clapped, the teacher let out a low, quiet sigh, seeing that Timothy was next to give his presentation. She was sitting in the back, so nobody saw her, but she still felt bad about the involuntary reaction as soon as it happened. She did not pick favorites among her students, she reminded herself, waiting for them to quiet down. Timothy was not a bad student nor a stupid individual, and this presentation promised to be well-researched because—as he rarely let anyone forget—his father was among the leading experts on the customs and cultures of ancient humans. The reason he grated on Ms. Garlan’s nerves was because he was… well… she hated the terminology, but there was really no better phrase to describe Timothy than “a little shit.”
“Timothy,” she said, shuffling her papers, bringing to the top of the pile the outline he turned in a week before. “It is time for your presentation on…” she paused, trying to decipher his handwriting, or trying to remember what she had decided it said last time she read it. “It's time for your presentation.”
He made his way to the front of the room in silence and settled a stack of note cards on the podium before looking up and beginning. “As you have heard so far from my esteemed colleagues,” he said, feigning a stuffy aristocratic air and gesturing loftily to his classmates, “the peoples of antiquity were very strange, indeed.” When he said the word “indeed,” it had far more emphasis on it than necessary and caused a ripple of laughter to run through the class.
“Timothy, try to stay on topic,” Ms Garlan said, with a hint of warning in her glance.
“My humblest apologies, my lady,” he said, with a deep bow.
“Timothy.”
“Yes ma’am, sorry.” His smug grin clarified that it was a hollow apology, but they had been through this song and dance enough times for her to know that she should be happy to get any apology at all.
“Continue.”
“We’ve heard a lot about strange things they did, and I’d like to talk to you today about a strange thing they did with their mouths.”
When snickers and whispers began running through the students and Timothy’s grin widened, panic began to well up inside Ms. Garlan. Every year in her Ancient Humanity class, some student got their hands on a piece of information about the sexual exploits of ancient humans, and every year it haunted her classroom—an unaddressed ghost underlying their conversations which they didn’t think she knew about. This year it had been the practice of oral sex that had captivated them, and of course, it was Timothy who had dug that one up and introduced it to his fellow students.
“You see, they used their mouths for LOTS of things. Some of them involved relationships between two people—”
“Timothy!” she warned over the uproar of laughter that followed.
“What? I was going to say ‘like talking.’”
She gave him a pointed, knowing look. He went on.
“They used their mouths for talking like we do now, but they also did this thing called ‘eating,’ because the poor, inefficient slobs couldn’t just plug-in like we do and had to get their energy from the mechanical and chemical breakdown of organic material, which they often referred to as,” he paused briefly, glancing down at his note cards, “food.”
“I know what you’re thinking,” he went on. “We already know about eating; it was a huge part of their culture and not only have we talked about it extensively in class, much of the language we still use today, being handed down from our ancestors, still reflects this infatuation. However, I wanted to talk today about a specific thing that they often ate. To demonstrate just how important food was to them, I want to demonstrate just how complicated of a process it was that they went through, to prepare this food that many of them considered simple.”
Ms. Garlan had to admit, it was actually a fairly well thought-out premise. She waited, hoping that her initial reservations would be proven to be baseless.
“We’ll start our story with a plant called…” he paused again, glancing at his notes, “Triticum aestivum. The story, however goes much further back than that. Our food-obsessed ancestors selectively bred and grew fields full of this stuff for over ten-thousand years, changing it slowly to get it to the form we are about to discuss.”
Timothy paused, and the class looked at him with large, shocked eyes. Ms. Garlan was impressed. Timothy often commanded the attention of his classmates, but it was rare that he used it for a productive purpose.
“They would pick huge amounts of this Tritic… whatever plant, then grind it up into a fine powder, and sometimes they’d even bleach it, to make it—”
“What’s a bleach?” interrupted Michael, a friend of Timothy’s who did get into trouble on occasion, but not usually without a bit of help.
“Raise your hands, please,” Ms. Garlan reminded.
“It’s a chemical used to make things look white,” answered Timothy, without even a glance towards the teacher. “Anyway, then they would mix this powdered plant with some water, sodium chloride (which they put in a lot of their food for some reason) and a few other things, like this single-celled fungus called ‘yeast.’ It was then left to sit a while so that the yeast could break down sugars and fart-out carbon dioxide.”
“What’s a fart?”
“I’m so glad you asked, Michael. A fart is—”
“Timothy, don’t you answer that question.”
“Okay Ms. Garlan.” And he actually had the nerve to wink at her before continuing. “Anyway, they’d go through all this trouble to make the stuff fluffy. They would then sprinkle it with the seeds from the… Sesamum indicum plant, then they’d put the whole thing inside a box that would heat it up a bunch, making it a very specific texture, making it dry, and killing all the yeast that they worked so hard to get in there in the first place.”
He paused here to let his glowing eyes pan over his fellow students.
“Now, you might think they’d be done at this point, but you’d be wrong. All that effort was just to make the part that goes on the outside.”
“The outside of what?” asked Wilma.
“Raise your hands, please.”
“Sorry,” replied Wilma.
“Between the pieces of post-heated plant paste, they would spread a bright red goo painstakingly made from the berry of the… Solanum lycopersicum plant, which had been mashed, mixed with a bunch more sodium-chloride, and some soluble carbohydrates, along with some other things, then heated for half a day.” Scattered mutters of astonishment could be heard around the classroom, but he talked over them, “They also sometimes included a bright yellow goo made from ground… Sinapis alba seeds that had been mixed with acid and... any guesses? That’s right, sodium chloride.”
“Why?” Michael again.
“Hands, please, Michael.”
“Just wait, it gets better. Aside from the red and yellow goop, they would put in slices of the gourd from the… Cucumis sativus plant that had been stored in weak acids with… Anethum graveolens leaves and the roots of the… Allium sativum, and that was all just extras, we haven’t even started to talk about the whole point of this food.”
More astonished mutters. Ms. Garlan had to suppress a grin. The students were really getting into this one.
“The whole point, it seems, for all the rest was as a delivery system for something, the description of which is not for the faint of heart!”
“Rein in the theatrics, please, Timothy.”
“Inside, they would put ground-up slices of ungulates!”
Cries of shock and outrage filled the room and Wilma, now horror-stricken, yelled out, “Like a giraffe?!”
“Quiet down now, kids. Timothy, a little sensitivity please.”
“I tried to warn them, but you called it ‘theatrics.’”
“They didn't really eat giraffes did they?!” asked Wilma, her little body clinking quietly as she shook.
“Wilma, feel free to step outside if you need to. Timothy, I trust you are nearing your point?” Wilma didn't move, obviously emotionally invested in whatever would come next.
“The… the lump of the… previously mentioned stuff…” he resumed with a grin, “would be burned over a fire, until it changed color and it was sometimes topped with a slice from a clump of coagulated lactation from the very same type of ungulate!”
This caused an uproar again and Wilma looked like she was going to faint.
“And they put that in their mouths?” yelled Michael.
“Settle down, now. Settle down.”
When they finally began to quiet, Timothy said, “Yes, all that effort was to gain what we get just by plugging into the wall. It really is amazing that they had time and energy enough to make us.” There were nods of agreement as he went on. “But it’s no wonder that they were so inefficient that we had to kill them all.”
Ms. Garlan smiled to herself as he made his way to his seat. Despite his antics and theatrics, it was a fairly well-done presentation, she thought, as she wrote an “A” on his outline.
