Cass Noah
The mark’s house had giant fingernail clippings strewn all over the lawn. His name was Devon, and he let giants pay to clip their nails on his lawn every week. He had pretensions that he was going to learn how to carve the massive keratin crescents into swords. He would take the giants’ money, useless to humans for anything but photo opportunities (“look at me with this huge dollar!”), and fold them into paper airplanes people could ride on. Devon hadn’t started on any of these projects. Nail clippings dug into the dirt around his lawn like discarded farm equipment. One day they would sink all the way in, Devon’s plans forgotten beneath the earth.
It didn’t take Mona long to sell him a Cheese Life. When she pulled up to his house, it was raining a little bit, a lawn sprinkler dusting. Just enough to get the neighborhood a little bit dark and a little bit wet. The black asphalt had been recently paved and Mona’s black rental car had been recently manufactured. They matched, both turning reflective in the weather. Mona knocked on the door with a haircut that was practically only bangs. Devon answered with a facial expression like he was about to sneeze, but it was just his face.
Mona was framed in the doorway by the debris field of stinking crescent moons of dead giant skin, the lawn overgrown around them. Over her shoulder her new black sedan stood smartly next to a boxy SUV propped up on cinderblocks. She didn’t get the chance to explain all the benefits of a Cheese Life, of living one’s life temporarily in the form of a wheel of cheese. She didn’t need to explain the dubious legal status it conveyed for tax purposes, the semi-legal life insurance workaround savvy customers could utilize, the timeshare-expensive and timeshare-onerous life insurance workaround coaching program her company offered for less savvy customers who they called “most regular people.” The very second Devon understood that there was a life he could live as anything in the world other than himself, his wallet was open.
The briefcase of samples was a formality. Devon seemed to make his choice at random. Nothing about this man, who looked like a series of tubes under plaid tucked into khaki, strongly implied cheddar. Maybe it was the first one he recognized. Maybe when Mona took a machine out of the rental’s trunk that transferred Devon’s essential conscious being into the body of a bright orange wheel of cheddar cheese, he recognized himself as he beheld his new body sitting in an insulated bag.
Mona tossed Devon’s house and found nothing of value: empty boxes, a dull carving knife filed next to cookware, a cabinet half disassembled and half hacked apart on a living room floor. There was a whistle that advertised its ability to attract giants. Mona didn’t test it.
She returned to HQ with the carving knife, which could be repaired, the whistle, which she of course claimed she had tested and found to be in working order, some spare change and loose cash. Devon’s new body entered a cheese fridge where Mona turned over the other wheels so they wouldn’t develop Cheese Life bedsores and rolled some of them along the floor for exercise. When she left the fridge, the room was windowless and dark. None of the Cheese Lives could talk to each other in the darkness. They were wheels of cheese.
When she clocked out Mona returned to her rental car in the lot with a massive paper bill folded up in the trunk, resting on top of the machine that brought customers into their Cheese Lives. She did not tell herself she would fold the bill, that she would learn to buy from giants or study macro-origami or that she would make it into anything. She only thought, as she held it in front of her in the mirror that night, Look at me with this huge dollar.
CASS NOAH is a fiction writer and poet. Their work has appeared in Nightmare Magazine, Eunoia Review, The Daily Drunk, and a few other places. They live in the United States.