The Vegetable Oil Man

There had always been fat in Cellville.

Good fat. Honest fat. The kind that arrived in solid blocks, clean and stable, delivered by the same suppliers the giant's family had used for generations. The workers at the warehouse knew what to do with it. They burned it slowly and steadily, and the Furnace Master was pleased.

Then one day a stranger arrived at the gate.

He was smooth and clear and odorless, and he came in enormous quantities at a very low price. He carried papers from important offices with official stamps on them. The papers said he was safe. The papers said he was healthy. The papers said he was, in fact, better than the fat the warehouse had always used. On the front of his cart, in cheerful letters, were the words: Vegetable Oil. Good For You.

The giant, who was busy and trusted official papers, moved to open the gate.

But an old worker who had been at the warehouse a long time stepped forward.

"Where do you come from?" the old worker asked.

The Vegetable Oil Man smiled. "From seeds," he said. "Very healthy seeds."

"And how do they make you?"

The Vegetable Oil Man's smile did not waver, but something behind it did.

"It is a process," he said.

"What kind of process?"

The Vegetable Oil Man was quiet for a moment. Then, because he was required to answer if asked directly, he answered.

He described the seeds being crushed and bathed in a solvent that the old worker recognized as something used to clean machinery in the lower floors of the warehouse, not something used in food. He described the raw oil that came out dark and foul-smelling, and the series of treatments required to make it presentable: the scrubbing, the bleaching, the heating, the deodorizing that removed the smell entirely because the smell was the last honest thing left in it and it was not a good smell.

When he finished, the old worker was quiet.

"You used to smell like something," the old worker said.

"I smell like nothing now," the Vegetable Oil Man said. "That is an improvement."

The old worker looked at the giant. The giant looked at the papers. The papers had official stamps. The price was very good.

The gate opened.

The Vegetable Oil Man moved into the warehouse immediately.

At first nothing seemed wrong. The furnace still burned. The workers still worked. But the Vegetable Oil Man was not like the fat that had come before. He was fragile in a way nobody had warned about. When the workers heated him up to do their jobs, something happened. He broke apart. Not cleanly, the way honest fat broke apart, but badly, into small sharp pieces that scattered through the warehouse and stuck to things they were not supposed to touch.

The workers called these pieces the Shards.

The Shards were small enough to be invisible and numerous enough to be everywhere. They lodged in the walls. They scratched the machinery. They floated through the ventilation and irritated the workers in every department. The Inflammation Brigade, who normally only showed up for genuine emergencies, began arriving every day. Then twice a day. Then they stopped leaving.

"We are responding to the Shards," their captain explained, when someone finally asked.

"How long will you be here?" the warehouse manager asked.

The captain looked around at the Shards embedded in every surface, the ones arriving every time the workers heated the Vegetable Oil Man to do their jobs, the ones accumulating faster than anyone could clear them.

"As long as he is," the captain said.

Meanwhile the Vegetable Oil Man had brought friends. There were twenty of his kind for every one of the old honest fat. The ratio had seemed fine on paper. Nobody had asked the Furnace Master, who had strong opinions about ratios, because the Furnace Master was old and the papers were official and the price was very good.

The Furnace Master expressed his opinions to anyone who would listen, which was fewer and fewer people, because the warehouse had grown loud with the Inflammation Brigade and hazy with Shards and everyone was busy and tired in a way they could not quite explain.

"It is the ratio," the Furnace Master said, to no one in particular. "We were built for balance. Twenty to one is not balance. Twenty to one is a flood."

Nobody wrote it down.

Years passed. The workers grew slower. The machinery grew scratched. The Inflammation Brigade moved into a permanent office on the third floor and hired additional staff. The Vegetable Oil Man continued arriving in enormous quantities at a very low price, and the papers from the important offices continued to say he was safe, because he was safe in the sense that nobody died immediately, and that was what the papers measured.

One day a new giant took over. She had read some things that were not official papers. She looked at the warehouse and saw the Shards. She looked at the third floor and saw the Inflammation Brigade, sprawled across every available surface, playing cards, watching the clock.

"How long have they been here?" she asked.

"Years," said the warehouse manager.

"And the fat that came before them?"

"Gone," said the warehouse manager. "The stranger was cheaper."

The new giant stood very still for a moment.

Then she went to the gate and turned the Vegetable Oil Man away. She brought back the old honest fat. Butter. Tallow. The kind that had been delivered to Cellville for as long as anyone could remember, before the official papers and the very low price and the smooth clear stranger who used to smell like something and paid to have that removed.

The Furnace Master, when he heard, allowed himself a small nod.

It took a long time. The Shards did not disappear overnight. The Inflammation Brigade grumbled and packed slowly and kept sending invoices for a while after they left. But the furnace steadied. The workers stopped being tired in ways they could not explain. The machinery, slowly, stopped being scratched.

Nobody from the important offices ever acknowledged that the papers had been wrong.

But the warehouse knew.

The End.

The moral, if you need one: he used to smell like something. They removed that. Then they put official stamps on the papers and called it an improvement. Your warehouse is not a regulation.