From an exercise for a Gotham Writer's Workshop

I could see how the cutlets could be sauteed with curried spinach, onions and cream, and how this would taste, if not delicious, certainly rewarding on top of a bed of rice. I could taste the future perfect of those chicken cutlets. I could smell the garlic frying.

But right now, those chicken cutlets were lying underneath a choke of plastic, like pale and fattened slugs. Where were the nerves, the rubbery tendons where was the puckered flap of cream-white outer skin?

The other meat choices were no more enticing. Every cut before me looked like the embodiment of nothing; the exact color and texture and glistening sheen I would attribute to this word. What do you feel like doing? Nothing. What did you learn at school today? Nothing. What do you feel like eating? Nothing. This.