By Alice Kinerk
We knew what people were saying but we didn’t care, we loved those little pink packets and we sprinkled that shit on everything. Into our coffee and onto our cereal. We chewed gum sweetened with it. Glugged it down in soda form. We didn’t care, we just wanted it.
Pink went down but came right back up again, returning to the world in the form of words. We talked about it. We tried to counteract the messages being broadcast on the nightly news. Bullshit! we shouted at Ted Koppel, as if our Ted Koppel could hear and would understand. Because yes, what was happening with that lady looked nasty, but nothing like that had ever happened to anyone we knew, and everyone we knew liked pink. Which made the lady seem a little unreal maybe, like a bedtime story for grownups, something you are supposed to think about for only a little while.
Then the blue packets came, and there was a rift, a parting, with some running off to join the blue packet train and others upholding their allegiance to pink. Those who went blue felt it was safer. Tastier, wholesome, choice. One by one, pink people turned blue. Surely that lady on the news went blue. That is, if she was still alive and no longer being tube-fed.
Blue felt good in us. An enlightened alternative. Blue came out in our inherent sweetness. When we cuddled in the arms of our boyfriend as his favorite team scored a goal, that was blue. When we stuck decapitated heads of celery into water so our sweet nieces could observe the roots grow, that was blue. We remembered our parents’ anniversaries: Blue. Checked in on friends we hadn’t seen: Blue. We were good citizens of the world. Life was better than it had been with pink.
But then they did it again, they came out with yellow packets, and while some of us were skeptical, beginning to feel we were being dragged through a pastel-colored candyland, destination unknown, most went for it, made the switch. Some younger ones among us never even tasted pink or blue but went straight from mother’s milk to yellow. The ads said yellow was more like sugar because it was made from sugar. Like our bodies might shrug, like good enough.
Our boyfriends dumped us. Not en masse, but many did. They called us bitchy and maybe we were. Maybe we talked too much about the little yellow packets and they got sick of it. But this stuff was different! You could bake with it! So maybe our boyfriends didn’t like the sugar cookies we baked for them with yellow. Maybe their bodies did not think it was good enough. By then, no one watched the news anymore, but the yellow packets had a website, and on it were photos of the annual retreat. (Yes, there was an actual, physical retreat for the most devoted yellows.) Of course, they were ordered to take down most photos after the lawsuit, but if you go to the website you can still see the enormous yellow flags they created. One whole row of yellow flags in front of the estate where the retreat was held, as if by the power of our devotion we had summoned up a new nation.
And so, by the time green hit, many of us were done. Disembarking from the color train. We didn’t want to hear about how green was all-natural, super safe, practically good for you. We did not believe that mother nature, in her wisdom, made good-for-you powdered chemicals for us to pour down our gullets. We were too old for that shit now. We had just survived a fucking global pandemic and so we saw the world differently. We saw sweetness in lilacs blooming, friends helloing, bright star pinpricks in balmy summer skies.
And when we want sugar we use sugar.
Alice Kinerk recently sat through a ChatGPT info session for work, and is excited that AI might be able to draft her dry-as-dirt emails and boring reports. However, she has and will continue to write fiction the old fashioned way, forming ideas in her gray matter and expressing them through her fingertips. For Alice, writing is about the journey. Her short stories have been published in Oyster River Pages, South Dakota Review, Rock Salt Journal, and elsewhere.
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