He grimaced and shook his head. "You'll...never do it."

I ran my tongue over my lips and looked at the plate in front of me. "Do what?"

"Eat that sammich."

"What?"

"That sammich." He shifted his eyes and made a terrible face. "That grilled cheese sammich."

Oh, wretched offering with brown hangings and twilight colored slices of charred wheat bread! Such was the dismal repast the counterman gave to me...to me...dazed, disappointed, barren, ravenous...I sat there suddenly paralyzed...my mind and body had congealed into one infinitely horrible hunger pang, despite this vision of a meal I would have long ago consigned to a trash bin somewhere. Then the terrible hunger was flooded with an even more terrible wave of nausea and I sat at the counter with my hands in my pockets so he wouldn't see they were shaking.

Cloned cheese...damned FDA! I know not where the dairy cow was born, save that the laboratory must have been infinitely cold and infinitely horrible, full of dark passages always hideously damp. And there was that accursed smell everywhere, a smell of odorous gases from commercial livestock operations.

He was watching me like a hawk now, the smirk on his puss gone. He saw what had happened to me when he said the name and there was a peculiar expression of disgust on his face.

Finally I piped up, "You sure it's...cloned cheese?

He barely nodded.

Ghastly and terrible was that dead, lifeless piece of cheese; black, ruined, deserted, and sinister. But more ghastly and terrible still was the hunger that rolled over me again, except worse this time. I knew the counterman wasn't lying and that mouldy cheese on my sandwich was surely unclean, abnormal, and detestable as I wolfed it down...