He knew what he wanted done with his body after dying. It wasn't something he had ever thought about, but now he knew. Under the flourescent hum of lights in this shopping center restaurant on the second floor he had decided.
The place was a chinese version of the food court in a U.S. mall. Dividers carved in an oriental style seperated the diners, mostly working Chinese on their way home for the evening, from the mingling shoppers. Next to McDonalds and caddy-corner from Starbucks, the shop served rice bowls and noodle soups on brown plastic trays with a blue plastic cup full of hot water to wash your utensils with. He was more thirsty than anything but decided upon a bowl of noodles with a "bbq variety" which meant some bits of chicken leg and neck (or maybe it was duck) sausages and beef brisquet (Ox according the english menu).
Waiting for the hot water to cool enough, he drank it down and started in on dinner. Everything tasted like salt. Deciding the salted egg was the best option, he tried removing it from the shell with chopsticks, then his fingers, then the chopsticks again. "it's amazing what these people will eat," he thought as he mixed the mutilated remnants of his egg in the rice then poured his soup over the whole affair.
Reflecting back on the day, the contents of the shops he had visited began to scroll through is memory. Bird's nest and shark's fin were in the medicinal shop. He remembered talking to an ex-pat in baja a few months ago about sea slugs and the Chinese. Here they were on the other end of the supply chain. Rare now in that stretch of the Sea of Cortez, they were common to see dried and pulverized in glass jars next to the bird's nests. Then there had been the salted fish and the salted pork, salted eggs and all manner of chicken parts in the food stalls...
It was then, in a moment of clarity, that he realized, the only fitting end for any human really, was to be salted, fermented in lime ash, ground into a powder and sold to the Chinese.
