Post-Apocalyptic Promptness

Turned out rather Vonnegut-ish, but here's the prompt:

Take two of your favorite songs, and match up a line from the chorus of one with a line from the chorus of the other. Then, write a scene that starts with the first lyric, and ends with the second.

They say, “Jump!” So I jump. I try not to be a follower, but demands usually get the best of me. I would have been a terrible terrorist negotiator. We stand in line, waiting patiently for our turn. It has been three days since the distribution of our rations. Even that fattest of us have turned to skeletons. So it goes.

They treat us like circus animals. We could care less. They control our sustenance, our means of survival. When they tell us to jump we were originally supposed to yell back “How high?” Then they realized that shouting would require giving us more water to restore our throats. They needed to keep us alive, and we wanted to live, for whatever reason.

They say, “Jump!” So we jump. The food could be worse. The water couldn’t. We are all very thankful that Soylent Green is not distributed and that Soylent Green is not people. Our caretakers are not apes either. Heston was way off. My commune and I live in a small village that contains the means to work and sleep, but not to eat. That’s how they engineered it. We wander back to the towering metropolis whenever they tell us to, which is really when too many of us start dying of hunger and exhaustion. So it goes.

Humans enslaving humans. That is the way of life, always has been. Contrary to popular belief the Jews and Blacks have not been the only victims of slavery. It’s been happening to everyone for as long as one guy has had bigger biceps then his neighbor. It happens. It just so happens that my fellow humans and I are weaker than our caretakers. For some reason, being enslaved makes me think of that old Seinfeld joke about how aliens see us picking up our dog’s poop and think that the dogs are in control. I wonder if we look like we’re in control.

I finally get my bowl of mush. Today’s flavor is despair. Just kidding, it has no flavor, just nutrients. Jokes keep me alive, even though I only joke in my head. Words have no use for us anymore. We understand them, but no longer speak them. It’s not allowed. Doesn’t bother me much, but I could use an audience.

The mush is demolished quickly and remnants stay in my beard for days. I think they might be good for facial hair too, keeping it nice and moist instead of dry and coarse. Overall, my life is not too different than when I wasn’t a slave. It’s all the same in the end. We live, we die. End of story. So we take our food and then we head back to our village. We wander for a while, without a purpose, out of nowhere.