In a dystopian near future, a chef who prepares only the final meals of the condemned takes it one order at a time…

(estimated reading time: 22 minutes)

Last Meal Ticket

by

Blaine Arcade

For once, the Republicans decided to pay for something. Stranger still, they were paying for public luxury, welfare class. Rather than a renovation it was more fitting to call it a metamorphosis when the workhorse building that had served a dozen governmental purposes got new paint, burgundy and charcoal, big curtains everywhere like a theater, crowned with three additional floors, and soundproofing that made the interior absorb anxiety.

Big rooms full of people still granted a sense of solitude in the weak lighting, turning others into shadows and props. Elegant, always fading and sinking like dusk in a sand tunnel, the Hall of Corrective Reduction had become an admired fixture of the city almost immediately after its transformative surgery.

Where did Republicans find the money for a public service? After the moral revolution of January 6^th, 2025 and the elimination of the Demon-rats all public funds were successfully moved from the deep state and into less leaky deep pockets, safe and secure. Those pockets didn’t open very often; congress under the supreme president insisted it was earmarked for investment, and once those investments paid out the American people would see ten thousand times what they put in.

So the new money for the better hall, and its more dignified professional staff, had to come from what was already circulating in related systems. A few of the better R-accountants noticed a significant redundancy, one of those antiquated cheese wheels the Demon-rats were always chewing on which somehow never got any smaller.

The courts already had all the staff they needed: judges, bailiffs, prosecutors, and stenographers. Then there was this massive expense draped over top, smothering the life out of the proceedings. Defense attorneys. In other words, someone the state was paying to refute what the prosecutor, whom the state was also paying, argued. What an incredible waste, and likely a cover for some other nefarious deep state program for which, conveniently, diagnostically, no shred of evidence existed, like all the rest.

This was the first corrective reduction. What little benefit ‘the defense’ offered citizens, peace of mind, could also be achieved by dressing up their situation in its Sunday best. Being condemned to death under fluorescent lights was a devaluation of human life, a cheap disrespect. Doing it under chandeliers meant they were seen, meant that, since they were on their way out, they could have a rationed taste of the finery all Americans would soon have, after the investments paid out.

Legal defense was a recurring expense, so after the building was finished there was room for staff more suited to the improvements. No more trashy ambulance chasers or coked up gang parrots squawking at every tug of the tight leash. Now the state could afford to give their R-executioners doctorates.

And the cooks became chefs.

And a few of those chefs were split from the bustling kitchen, given narrower purview.

Chef Porter was one of those.

Order: deep dish macaroni and cheese, pitcher of pink lemonade, net of chocolate coins

“Shit,” he muttered at the last possible moment, before the microphone pinned to his burgundy chef’s coat connected to the speakers embedded in the ceiling corners of the next chamber over. Microplaning a layer of Gouda would sound like a roll of paper towels on a box grater to such a scalding hot mic, so he finished that too as the fourth wall of his kitchen, the glass one, introduced his latest audience via the rotating room that used to be the savings accounts of three public defenders.

Porter stood tall, then bowed. Eye contact was enough, especially when he had to get to the jalapeno cheddar mix layering before the finely diced peppers lost their crisp edge. Six observers. All leaning forward in their theater chairs, fingers interwoven if they weren’t swirling wine in the wrong sort of glass. Chef Porter wouldn’t be caught dead serving red in one of those to his convicted customers.

If they sold tickets he had to answer their questions; that was the order from above. Not a regular ticket of course, that only got you into the execution. Premium passes entitled you to the evidence auction, the arresting officer’s medal ceremony, and a viewing of last meal preparations. Questions were extra on top of that. They might not ask an-

“Why does your cookware look like it came from a yard sale?” Porter’s knife froze halfway through a truffle, the wrinkled edges of its internal brain tissue pattern peeking out. A glance too quick to show hostility revealed a boggle-eyed asker, mouth agape, curly hair ill-suited to jowly face. One of those ones. The guys who rarely took a day off from the office, and when they did it was to spend far too much of their discretionary income on something like this. A guy who wondered what the knife felt like in the hand in senses both culinary and violent, because he couldn’t comprehend street level violence or cooking anything but peelable plastic films.

“As a last meal chef it is my duty to honor every aspect of the condemned’s order,” Porter answered mechanically, but still kind of a bark, something like a tin toy robot marching off a shelf to strike a passing person’s head. “And to utilize my best judgment when they refuse to elaborate.

People don’t like to explain their order or make substitutions. They want a menu that reads their mind before they open it, but they don’t like being told what they want. The right option has to be there, and they have to pick it… and the chef must know the details at the end of that process: how it should be cooked, how it appears, and how much salt there is.”

“You didn’t answer my question really,” the ogler pointed out, bottom barely in his seat as he tried to stare all the way down the tall ceramic casserole dish with pleated sides, like a coffee filter. Before he spoke again Porter sliced off a feather of a third cheese, dropped it in a scalding pan, and drew it out from its flash of white smoke to reveal a golden brown doily of cheese that he momentarily held up to the window-wall, where it was admired like the first snowflake of the seasoning.

“I did,” the chef explained,” if you were to ruminate on it. You have seen the condemned’s order. Not many words, and far more requests.

He has requested a veritable reservoir of cheese and noodles, into which he wishes to dip his hand and sip from. It will quench thirst because it is comfort food. The pink lemonade here,” he pointed with the scythe that was his primary knife to a jug of whimsical rose, topped with glacial crystal cubes, “is served in this vessel because that is how it was served in childhood, likely on the porch.

The memory is what he will be eating. I can dress it up usually, give it formal attire, but certain down-home elements are vital. This yard sale dish as you call it is a loving mother’s dish. It’s at the table more than each family member who is not the cook. It too is comfort. Look closely, is this not familiar?”

The rest of the audience leaned in too, but only the disrespectful one smudged the glass with his forehead. Chef Porter placed the lacy nearly-burnt cheese over the lip of the dish. Memories triggered for some of them, those whose parents had to actually do the family cooking. A smell taking over the ground floor. An oven door gone steamy. Cheese and cream bubbling over as caldera, gluing and caking to the lip in bubbly rivulets. They weren’t the dish, but that was where the flavor was.

“And the chocolate coins?” someone else asked as the unwilling performer swung the dish around and loaded it into a great oven, stainless only on the exterior panels.

“A favorite dessert,” he guessed, much less sure. “And an allowance too.” Light laughter floated their curiosity away. Not Porter’s. Later he would request the tape of the meal. Most people he knew entirely, from their order, even if the slip was blank. Any time he didn’t warranted investigation. It was their final pleasure after all, and his job to get it right.

Coins were a candy, not comforting dessert. Macaroni and cheese was typically paired with pudding, ice cream, or cake. The tape revealed it, no need for audio. Leaning back in his chair, full of satisfaction, the condemned, shaking his wrists temporarily free of manacles, plucked two chocolate coins from their net, unwrapped them from the gold foil lovingly, and placed them over his closed eyes.

In this position he reclined until a frustrated guard moved in and started clearing away the dishes. Another one slapped him on the ear, trying to dislodge his dessert, but it didn’t work, as his body heat, the last of his belongings, had partly melted the coins to his lashes and lids. Porter saw his grainy smile, and that his eyes didn’t open again until he was dragged out of sight.

Not to eat then. To pay the ferryman. They would wipe him clean before he was strapped to the chair, but it would be impossible to get all of it. Some trace of chocolate would be in his pores and follicles. All that tempering was actually casting, and how well the chef had done it would determine whether the ferryman bit the coins to test for authenticity when the condemned arrived. Boy would he be in for a surprise.

None of the R-guards, R-nurses, or R-janitors would catch his reclining nod to such an old superstition. The resources that taught that were moved, the bookshelves demolished, as you didn’t need shelves when you only had one book. Lower maintenance cost too.

Porter knew because of his proximity to death, having seen professors die, librarians die, researchers die, and poets die dramatically. He didn’t learn much outside his cheese wheelhouse these days though, as he’d seen enough of the finale. It never changed, while he always shot for a seasonal menu.

No, he didn’t watch them eat. Instead he stood in the quiet of his kitchen, savoring no longer being watched, and waited to see what was sent back first, customer or meal, each to their makers.

Order: Cajun-fried shrimp, boiled corn, bib-ticklers, extra sweet tea

“Chef Porter?” Startled, the master of the kitchen bolted up from his lean, where the fan in the cooling oven had been drying the sweat on his neck. He’d barely gotten into the zen of the post-serving bliss, where he felt little more than a glass gargoyle on the counter filled with dry beans. Only a guard could interrupt him.

“What? Is he finished already?”

“No… he’s whining about the fried stuff, says you did it wrong. He wants you to do it again.”

“What exactly is he perceiving as ‘wrong’ about it? And which fried item, the shrimp or the flowers?”

“I didn’t ask,” the guard grumbled. How quickly their respect for him flaked off, these R-goons who liked everything well done and cloaked in the red high fructose corn syrup they were legally permitted to call ketchup now. “You know the routine. If there’s a meal issue they might call in the administrator and then there might be a delay. We’ve got six more to do this week, and we can’t exactly throw the chair in the dishwasher with the rest of your stuff can we?”

“Take me to it.”

“What? Just remake the damn thing.”

“This will probably be faster.” That convinced him. The hallway to the dining cell was long, full of paintings, themselves full of people, always gathered around some public event obscured from view by their shoulders. They might be watching a body dangle from the gallows or one in a butcher shop window. None of them watched Chef Porter, who was glad he could fume in a passage of turned backs for once, steam his response to perfection.

And there was plenty to fume about. The sheer audacity for one. Yes, Chef Porter’s long resume was touted by his superiors, talked about to the condemned the way a doctor might recommend a new treatment, but it was still a stretch to think you could get away with ordering ‘bib ticklers’ and leave it at that.

The condemned would have guessed his chef would have no idea what those even were. He probably thought ordering something obscure would give him extra hours and minutes while the state tried to track down a bag of them or at least knowledge of their existence. Porter just needed a few minutes on the phone with his contacts.

Through them he learned the ticklers were a hyper-regional preparation of fried squash blossoms never more present on the national culinary stage than winning a bronze T-bone in the Bryceland ‘Good-at-Bad-for-You’ food fair in 1985. To get them right you had to individually batter and dunk only the base of the blossom to golden-brown, leaving the creamy orange petals exposed, just steamed enough by the oil to wilt open, critically, not below a forty-five degree angle.

One drop of errant leaping oil could weaken a petal at a crucial juncture and droop the whole thing right in. Chef Porter had discarded fifteen perfectly good flowers making sure the batch of ten was perfect. There was an experimental one as well, allowed to briefly cool, where the test was less for flavor and more for behavior.

The scanned article his colleague had hurriedly sent over, the gray of the paper captured better than the words themselves, informed him that they were called bib ticklers because the petals were so soft that people often rubbed them around their faces before the first bite. If an audience had spun into being while he was applying them as fried lipstick he would’ve had to explain himself to the sorts of idiots who thought that such a feminine wrist motion from a man was literal treason against their bodybuilding Jesus Christ.

Chef Porter entered before the guard against protocol, like a dragon-belched flame, received by the condemned as some sort of shocking vengeful angel with a red hot carving fork. Before anyone could speak Porter analyzed the platters and saw the food was barely disturbed. The third-cobs of corn hadn’t even shifted from the way he’d piled them.

“I heard there was a complaint,” he boomed at a reasonable volume. The condemned had the tablecloth pulled out from his plan, and still not a single kernel of corn disturbed. It took him a moment to speak, and one after that to blink.

“The… the ticklers are wrong. They’re soggy…” Chef Porter approached, which didn’t feel possible given his forceful entrance, so the condemned flinched backward to prevent him from occupying the same space. In the end he only occupied it enough to pluck one fried blossom from the arrangement, which he popped in his mouth and chewed, pausing to inhale and exhale through nostrils alone. As he finished his tongue washed itself against the roof of his mouth, finishing with a disapproving cluck.

“So?” the other guard in the corner asked. “Do you want to fry up some more?”

“No,” Porter spat, whirling to leave, “I want you to fry him.”

Order: molten mini-mart muffin with white chocolate swirl filling, cheese twiddles, and a cigarette

“Is he using a microwave?” a new heckler scoffed behind the glass, after already having commented he was glad of it for making them unable to smell the other side. You could smell gas stations for free after all.

“Yes Graham, now be quiet,” the woman who pretended not to be his wife whenever he spoke groaned. It wasn’t becoming of him to complain about the evening out he had insisted upon. It wasn’t even execution season; the big protests happened in spring.

Chef Porter pretended not to hear and continued about his meticulous preparations and plating. The muffin would remain in its cramped steam until the last moment, staying injuriously hot in the middle and growing unpleasantly damp on the exterior, just the skin that would be present inside its plastic wrapper on a hot day.

Cheese twiddles would be served in the bag, the sides slit with a scalpel, its face peeled back and rolled under to create a crinkly bowl that would make all the correct sounds without getting too much cheese powder too far up the knuckle hair.

Particularly clever was his placement of a fine film of that powder, and obliterated crumbs from the muffin bottom, around the rim of the cigarette. It was applied with kitchen-grade edible tape: a product not even on the market yet. A delicate touch was required to not rip away any of the cigarette’s paper, and he managed it even with the interruption.

“Cripes, it’s a smoke, what are we doing here?” Graham got louder. “Let’s move it along guy, I want to get to the chair.” The chair was on the clock, just like everything else. There was no rushing it, only delaying it on the chef’s authority.

“It’s not a smoke,” the master finally countered as he fetched the explosive muffin from its vessel, loud and solid enough to make the glass between them vanish. “It’s an atmosphere compressed down to several breaths. It’s the interior of a gas station.

This man has requested for his last meal an experience, perhaps when he first figured out what sort of person he was, or perhaps the last time he was free. Either way it was in a gas station, and this moment in food is just as vital to him as any first class salmon sauce-drowned on the Titanic.”

He stepped back and marveled at the elevated white trash courses, from cheesy appetizer to the wispy silk of a dessert sure to be inhaled. Porter finished it off with a lighter, flicked open and stuck on in the tray’s corner like a candle. Then the guard came and took it. Only the complaints of the condemned mattered, so whatever that Graham cracker said after wasn’t processed.

The muffin’s center would burn the tongue, deaden taste. Then the smoke would fill the place up, teaching him what other parts could experience it. Porter had his smoke trail, he was sure, and had followed it the way a cartoon bear was reeled in by the scent of a windowsill pie.

This condemned was a peaceful citizen who never caused any trouble, as long as he was in a gas station. Those were oases, neutral ground. He was a good boy who stopped in and got his snacks, handed over the money, smiled at the cashier, and left, never speaking with anything other than the bell over the door.

Porter got his expected review: five stars of total silence.

Order: a bowl of ‘Amber Waves’ cereal

The guard entered a state of madness, manifested in his ears as a terrible grinding. Chef Porter was feeding grains into a rusty pitted mill of some kind, almost as old as the electric chairs. Plumes of dust were coughed out along with the processed material. The wheel that turned it was heavy and it took both the man’s hands and all his weight pushed into his shoulders to move it. Ovens hummed, heating the whole place to sweltering as the chef sweated in place.

“What are you doing?” the guard shouted over the mill. He tapped his watch in case the man didn’t hear him, but it did no good since he wasn’t looking either. “We’re behind!”

“To get the highest quality I have to hand grind it,” Porter claimed without slowing. “It’s called amber waves damn it; it’s all about the grain.”

“It’s a lousy breakfast cereal! Just pop open a bag, pour, and add milk.”

“That reminds me; I need a cow.”

“What, like steak?”

“No, a cow you idiot! Raw milk will have the freshest flavor, and the risks don’t matter because the E. coli will get zapped along with everything else.”

“I’m not letting a cow in here,” the guard argued. “It’ll stink up the place.” A butcher knife sailed through the air, stuck in the door frame next to the guard’s hand. The machine ground to a halt, only after the impact, Porter’s momentum overpowering the slowing rust briefly.

“As if you don’t!” he screamed. “You’ll bring me the cow if you know what’s good for you. And I need bones for gelatin, otherwise it won’t have the purple marshmallow mountain majesties! It’s his last meal! It must be perfect. No artificial ingredients.”

“Chef… you can’t delay it until he’s not fourteen anymore.”

“There’s no ingredient more artificial than capped time. This is my domain! I’m king here and my word is law! Now do as I say or I’ll-“

Order: sea bass sashimi, three Maine lobster tails, two Wagyu top rounds, truffle and quail egg omelet, Beluga caviar with artisanal flatbread, blood orange honeycomb, saffron risotto, buttermilk biscuit with Black Forest dry-aged ham, pistachio baklava, civet coffee served black

Too much of himself had been put into this one. It was really a chance to flex his muscles, causing him to flex them again as he pushed the cart down that long hallway to make the presentation in person. Whoever they were they had a refined yet broad palate, and had given away little about themselves. It was like they just wanted to see what Porter could do given the resource ceiling. Hell, the civet coffee had to pass through a jungle mammal’s digestive system before it could even be harvested.

The scents wafted back to him through the seams of silver domes, blended well because of subtle adjustments he had made to unite the meal: cooking wine overlap, sourcing from nearby regions, and transferable fond between dishes never being given a chance to cool. For a while the condemned would forget where she was. The tastelessness of the R-brigade would dissolve. In six months that kind of spread might not even be possible outside of the percentage of a percentage who could own the facilities where they were produced. That was the point of the fancy building, the nice uniforms; it was all a facade so the interior could be stripped for parts and sold off. If the product wasn’t drained of quality, what would be turned into profit?

She sat there, arms crossed, watching Chef Porter prepare and serve the all the finishing touches. In between butter brushes and salt flaking he stole glances at her that worried him. Something was off. Her appetite was elsewhere. Porter stepped back, put his arms behind his back, as there was nothing more he could do.

“Bon appetit.” The condemned leaned forward, smelled it all, let it out slowly.

“Never mind,” she said, “I’m not hungry.”

The guards reacted first. Accosting her didn’t move her one inch. They went at it until most of the steam died down. One was so red in the face, so close to bursting, that he decided to try something else.

“Fine, I guess it’s free food for us then.” He moved toward the ham biscuit, but his fingers couldn’t get there without separating themselves on Porter’s lunging knife. The man withdrew, had the eyes of a fear-frozen mouse.

“There’s no such thing as a free lunch anymore,” Porter scolded them. “It’s her order. She can do whatever she wants with it; she’s paying with her life.”

“Yeah,” she added. Her head cocked to the trash bin against the wall. “Box it up for me.” Porter met her challenge, the other guard only toying with the idea of getting in his way. The bin was dragged over noisily, the top popped off with the flat of the knife. Then in three big sweeps the chef pushed the entire spread into the garbage. Even with all that preparation it only took half a second to become identical to every other pile fouling up a street corner.

“Jesus,” one of the guards said as he gawked at the carnage. “I think I’m going to be sick.” As if he’d never seen a pile of civilized meat thrown away before.

“Why did you do that!?” the other demanded.

“She wanted to hurt you,” the chef explained. “Do a little more damage. If those are her tastes, those are her tastes. I’ve served worse. Excuse me.” They didn’t, so he excused himself.

Later, while he cleaned up the kitchen, one of the R-accountants, smallest of men, came to him and yelled. That meal cost thousands. Anybody could request the same and then let it go to waste. Why? Why should they humor such wasteful disrespect?

“Because it’s all they have to look forward to,” Chef Porter answered him, erasing the last traces of the condemned with a seasoned rag across his marble counter top. “Everybody’s time comes, and you’ve moved all the timetables up. This is fast food, but still made to order.

You’ll leave me right where I am. Don’t you want them lining up at the slaughterhouse? Doesn’t that make it cheaper in the long run? No chasing them down. Just tell them it’s free, and there are no strings attached, just a few wires.

They’ll come running.”

The End