Appetizer: The Workers

In the kitchen of CristopheroColombia, the stoves glowed with a bureaucratic heat, and the cupboards rattled with paper. Here, El Presidente — un bad hombre — waddled in, belly-first, the same belly that once, in the Disunited Frames, had turned itself belly-up like a Kafka beetle.

But now his metamorphosis had deepened: no longer merely grotesque in form, he had become a gluttonous priest of bureaucracy, preparing to consume his people as if they were the nation’s natural hors d’oeuvres.

The workers arrived not as citizens but as creatures. Kafka would have recognized them: clerks with thoraxes, teachers with antennae, nurses crawling with the long legs of cockroaches. Each carried on its carapace a stamped decree: permit approved, loan denied, case closed. The very ink of bureaucracy had become their shell.

The fluorescent lights buzzed like a chorus of typewriters. The swarm scuttled in crooked lines, their antennae twitching to the rhythm of rubber stamps. They did not sing protest songs, but the monotonous hum of waiting rooms and government offices.

“¡Maravilloso!” bellowed El Presidente, un bad hombre, his voice greasy with delight. “At last, the hors d’oeuvres arrive pre-packaged — portioned and numbered! Innovation made flesh!” He lifted his golden fork, a trident hammered out of campaign promises, and plunged it into the swarm.

He chewed loudly, bones and wings snapping like brittle constitutions. Ink smeared his lips, the bureaucratic sauce of the nation.

Each bite erased an institution:

a factory dissolved into sludge in his stomach,

a school shriveled like paper in a furnace,

a hospital burst like a blister on his tongue.

He belched, and the air filled with the smell of disinfectant, despair, and broken ballots. “Delicious,” he declared, patting his legendary belly. “Such innovation in suffering! Such efficiency in sacrifice!”

The swarm, compelled by invisible decrees lodged in their thoraxes, crawled forward into his maw. They clicked their mandibles in unison, as if chanting: Better to be consumed than forgotten.

And high above, drifting like a bloated omen, the Great McCarthy-zeppelin hovered. Its sagging bulk cast no shade, only suspicion, while El Presidente raised a goblet of molten rhetoric and toasted his own appetite.

“Workers are but snacks,” he declared, stomach rumbling like a parliament in ruins. “Bring me the main course! Bring me the children!”