Sausagefest

Fiction

The first video was filmed vertically, badly lit, with the sound blown out by the hum of a refrigerator. The caption read: Dad keeps choking, does anyone know what this could be? You could hear the videographer breathing just out of frame, nervous but trying to stay calm. The man sat at a kitchen table in a cardigan, hands folded, eyes wet with strain. When his mouth opened, it wasn’t sudden, it was full of effort. Something pale and smooth slid forward, folded once against his lower lip, then dropped to the tabletop with a dull, moist, flopping sound.

And then the deluge, the man leaned to the side, retched, and emitted a dozen more onto the floor in a matter of a few seconds.

The comments were immediate. Filters. Prosthetics. AI. Someone added the Oh No TikTok song by Capone. Someone stitched it with a laugh so hard it turned into coughing.

By the time a local news station broadcast it with the chyron Internet Hoax Debunked, three other videos had surfaced. Different houses. Different mouths. Same slow, impossible extrusion.

It took the hospitals longer to react, because the symptoms didn’t present like an emergency. No pain or bleeding, no internal reason was found. The patients arrived embarrassed, carrying grocery bags small storage bins, apologizing for the smell. Intake nurses wrote foreign body production and crossed it out. Doctors said esophageal anomaly and then stopped saying anything at all.

The problem was the odor. It was enticing. Garlic, onions, fat, sometimes smokey, sometimes not.

Language shifted quickly. “Sausage” felt too specific, but it stuck amongst most people. The official paperwork settled on “output.” Facilities posted laminated sheets explaining proper handling procedures. Gloves. Masks. The sheets were revised twice in the first month, not because they were wrong, but because they were inadequate to the scale of compliance required.

The people producing it were almost all elderly. Not exclusively, but enough that the association stuck. Late onset. Post-retirement. Theories circulated and burned out: microplastics, processed food, Covid vaccines, cell phone radiation. No one proved anything. No one found a cure. Insurance codes appeared anyway.

The next shift didn’t happen in hospitals. It happened online, the way these things always do, sideways and without permission.

Someone stitched the original video with a frying pan. No music. No caption beyond a shrug emoji. The camera stayed fixed on the stovetop while a hand turned the sausage with a fork, cautious at first, then less so. It browned like anything else. When it was done, the person cut off a piece and set it on a paper towel.

A boy leaned into frame. Maybe twelve. He chewed. He thought about it. Then he said it tasted normal.

That was all it took.

The platform filled the gap with efficiency. More pans. Different kitchens. They called it the “sausage challenge.” People argued briefly about safety, then stopped. Someone posted a clip with the comment turned off.

Within days, the videos began to cluster. Not intentionally. The algorithm did it. Accents aligned. Backgrounds repeated. The same kitchens appeared again and again, separated by oceans but familiar in layout. The comments stopped laughing and started correcting technique.

It became known, without being announced, that the output varied. This wasn’t surprising to anyone who thought about it for more than a second, which most people didn’t. The pattern was obvious enough that no one bothered to explain it. The platform tagged what it could. The rest was handled by implication.

By the time news outlets tried to intervene, the moment had passed. The challenge had already burned itself out, replaced by compilations and recipes and quiet, unbranded instruction. The question of whether it was acceptable no longer seemed relevant.

It was food. The videos had proved that much. The rest followed on its own.

Munich’s Oktoberfest was the first attempt to cash in on the phenomenon. Steamer pans appeared under tables, not announced, just there one morning, already dented from use. Men named Hans and Dieter and Klaus sat with their beers and stared ahead while their bodies did what they did. Their friends averted their eyes with an air of politeness. The band did not stop playing. The sausages were carried away by people whose job it had quietly become to do that.

The smell settled into public spaces like a permanent weather system. Not overpowering. Familiar.

Commerce followed, as it always does. A pilot program was announced under the banner of innovative elder solutions. A press release praised dignity, sustainability, and closed-loop systems. A brand name appeared once in the third paragraph and was not mentioned again, though everyone noticed. The first facility to turn a profit was commended for operational efficiency. The word harvest was proposed and immediately rejected.

Children grew up with it. That was the part no one had predicted, because no one ever predicts normalization. Kids learned not to flinch. They learned which adults needed napkins nearby and which did not. They learned that some mouths made things now, and that this was not a story to tell at school unless you wanted the teacher to sigh and change the subject.

The phenomenon plateaued. That was the term the researchers used, though no one could say what it meant. The numbers stopped climbing. The supply chains stabilized. There were fewer leaks. Better drains. Better language.

Restaurants simplified menus. It wasn’t ideological, it was practical. Open cuts fell out of favor. Steaks became nostalgia. You could still find them, sometimes, in rural places that hadn’t yet adapted, but even there they were wrapped tighter than before, as if embarrassed.

By the time the last major grocery chain completed its transition, no announcement was made. There was no boycott. No protest worth mentioning. People bought what was available. They always had.

The freezers hummed. The shelves gleamed. Everything came in a casing now, smooth and uniform, each item promising containment. Children asked where the old food had gone and were told, gently, that this was how it was done now. That it was cleaner. That it was safer. That sausages were the sustainable future of food. That hunger had been solved.

No one talks about where the sausage comes from these days, but everybody knows.

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This story was inspired by an AI generated Facebook Reel.