Across the table from him, the woman in question levels him a flat stare. The words he spoke were without heat, but he will be the first to admit they may have been a little brusque. He’d like to have kept a more even tone, but dammit, he’s passionate about this. Besides, it’s not like she hasn’t done similar.
“You’ve been slaughtering animals since you were what? Six? Seven?”
“Again, Tyler, that depends on what you count as animals because you seem infuriated over the rabbits but only mildly upset about the trout.”
Tyler ignores her goading, taking the high road. He has a point here, he’s not going to let her ruffle him.
“And never once were you like, ‘maybe this is a little fucked?’”
Kimi, if anything is even less amused.
He sighs in frustration, throwing his hands up in the air. It’s been an hour and she is still missing what he’s trying to say. This is the modern day, there are other, better ways to do this. What Kimi does is a throwback to a bygone age where people carried spears and wore loincloths. It’s bullshit, plain and simple. Brutal, uncalled for bullshit.
“I think you misunderstand, Tyler,” Kimi says slowly. Much about her is that way. Not a word wasted or a movement made without a point. It’s why he even tried talking to her about this because she listens and considers most the time.
“I think that you believe what I do is uncalled for. Sport, maybe. Chest beating arrogance, perhaps.”
Kimi stares him dead in the eye.
“It’s not that. The way I see it, what you do is worse.”
Baffled, Tyler makes an incredulous gesture with his hand as if to say ‘how??’
“I only take what I need. What I take I know has grown naturally. It isn’t fed feed it wasn’t evolutionarily adapted for, wasn’t kept in cesspool feedlots, doesn’t tax the habitat-”
“You could just not eat meat,” Tyler quips blandly.
“Alright. Then I’d be stressing stripped topsoils and supporting fertilizer wastes that run into water systems and causes massive die-offs. Not to mention the exploitation of human labor for inhumane wages, the environmental impact of transportation and processing-”
“There are companies that don’t do that. Why are you so dead set on looking for holes?”
“I don’t have that kind of money. What I do is economic, sustainable, humane, and environmentally friendly. I just don’t remove myself from the process of killing and processing an animal. That’s it.”
“You kill things, Kimi. Like it was two hundred years in the past and you have to keep for the hard winter, looking out for shit like yellow fever and polio.”
Kimi inhales deeply, carefully exhaling through her nose. She never once looks away, though she does take a sip of the water in front of her.
“You, Tyler, have a bad case of commodity fetishism and a secular, elitist attitude.”
Tyler blinks, a little surprised.
“Did you...Kimi, did you just throw Marxist theory at me?”
She gives him that look again. Unmoved and unimpressed.
“Contrary to what you may think, I am neither ignorant or uninformed. But I’m beginning to believe you might be.”
