It was one o’clock, and the afternoon ritual was upon the office. Upon every office in the square-mile of city block that huddled all the corporations together like gossiping penguins. Over the course of the day, the towers, fuelled by the symphonic rattles and tattles of keyboards and whiteboards and bored boards meeting about cardboards, smeared their shadows from the eastern suburbs to the western docks. In the afternoon there was a temporary thinning of the fierce black shadow as all the minions rattling inside the concrete machine vacated their kingdom, gutting the towers and leaving it exposed to the infiltration of the sunlight.

The gutting of the towers happened every day at one o’clock, sharp.

Heads bounced out the double swinging doors, each person was identifiable by all the different patterns made by the absence of keratin strands sprouting off their scalp. They moved like a pebble peach that had come alive, all moving in the same direction.

The unfortunate civilian, either new to the city or unable to rearrange essential appointments, who found themselves out at the ritual hour was simply drowned in the marching mass. Some joined in the foray – not, of course, voluntarily – but the chemical aroma of the whole parade just took the reins of their locomotion. Broiling and beading, the macro matter of humans reorganized for ever obstacle, every acute alley, narrow bridge, or hindrance of hills up and down. Eventually the head of the movement came to a brick building, one that was textured with white paint and a smorgasbord of mosses, and it drove itself inside until the building could fit no more. One-by-one, those in the building began to leave, with hot styrofoam bowls in their hand, opening a little pocket of air for a new body to fill.

Eighteen cups of cumin, fifty-two cups of split peas imported directly from Bombay, whatever vegetables had been scheduled for disposal that morning, herbs, more spices, a hot chilli, and the pinch of salt, and, of crucial importance, ten whole kegs of Coutun’s Finest Vegetable Oil. Cooked for twelve hours straight, on a low simmer, the entire mixture was in constant flux. Kept cool by heaters that spun water vapour at the base of the vat, there was only ever one time that the pot for cooking this concoction had ever been cleaned. That was when it’d first arrived at the kitchen.

From a certain angle, the whole process was almost poetic, the loss and regrowth of the grub inside the vat could be compared to the human body. Symbolically, the entity is constant even while it spits and spews its parts all around the town. To distinguish the container that held the concoction from the concoction itself was like delineating the human and their bones. The more intellectually inclined, philosophers, biologists, or physicists, even hypothesized that the system that comprised of the vat and the food may be partially conscious.

But for most, theorizing about the vat was of no interest, perhaps they even struggled in the axis of self-awareness that allowed them to reflect on their primal moments. The Vat of Goodness hit their bloodstream harder than cocaine, sung through their neurons with passion more ablaze than the flesh contact of two fresh lovers, it was alkaline for the battery of life.

And they couldn’t stop coming back for more.

The after effects for having consumed an entire styrofoam bowl full of the stuff were drowsiness, slurred speech, and a general sharp decline in doing anything productive other than staring at the back of one’s own eyelids. If, for a day, the businesses could cut the The Vat of Goodness from the minds of every employee, they would be shocked to see an anomalous eighty-percent spike in the total profit margins of whatever the company was doing to keep cash flow.

The Vats of Goodness, like a great oak that could remember when a canyon was more shallow, was rooted deep into the heart of the work lives of the business sector.

And then one day, The Vat of Goodness was gone. The white brick building, speckled with all its mosses, the doorway that cast out hooks of smells to snare the unaware passerby, the whole operation, shut down. Windows boarded, door locked, not a sound or smell inside to be heard of sniffed. Not even the great lugholes of an elephant could have heard the sprinkle of cumin seeds through that wall – the place was dead.

The Vat of Goodness never advertised itself, nor stuck to a particular agenda about when it would shut for the night or open for the morning. The whole process was dealt with organically, newcomers would be introduced to the afternoon coke stew either by happening upon a manic swarm of hungry addicts, or stumbling into the door during a lull in the late afternoon. When the thousandfold army of balding, sweaty, cubicle machines swam up to the door that day, an agenda certainly wouldn’t have done them any good. It would have just brought on the maelstrom a couple hours earlier.

“Closed for refurbishment,” is what the sign said on the door to the brick palace. It took ten different people to read it, and forty-five independent conversations between said people, before the reality of the situation dawned on them.

First to swing a punch was a short, tubby man with a nose that sat upward like he was undergoing a permanent olfactory exam. His fist met with the waist of a woman, who retaliated by stabbing him in the shoulder with the high heels she held in her hand. She always did the daily pilgrimage barefoot.

Fists, foots, hairs, shoes, and ties, became a tornado of drab office fashion. Soon the soup of fighting was garnished with teeth, blood, and a finger or two. The police force was called in to disperse the chaos, but when no one arrived, it became clear that the police force were part of that afternoon lunch rush.

Some tried to flee, only to be dragged back into the fray, others, perhaps fasting for that day and having skipped lunch, hear of the tussle down near The Vat of Goodness, and jumped on their bikes to get in on the action.

By the time the shadows of the business towers had done their full circuit, the fighting was still without a crescendo. No one could sleep because everyone was in every street, every ditch, or pressed in every alleyway hurling buckets and lugging fists, trying to drive away the Goodness pangs in their stomachs.

And then the next morning, day broke, the business towers launched their shadows on the eastern hills. All was silent in the city, not a car tooted or a siren wailed. A few birds questioned the sky. Cars were strewn into roads, blinkers still flashing after their drivers abruptly leapt out to dive head first into a nearby mob. No one person, was outside to see, no person was inside to see. No person was anywhere. Instead, all that remained was an oily, sticky, concoction that seeped over the sidewalks, clogged the drains, and clung to the ledges of windows. It bubbled and broiled like it was being heated from below, and it folded over and under itself like seeping lava, towards the sea.