Milk

I was hired to do graphic design for a company specializing in ant-lion milk. They claimed it was the next big thing, that all the entrepreneurs of the world drank it every morning to get big ideas, and that it would increase the size of your secondary sexual characteristics by a factor of fifty.

I thought, going in, and based on the promotional material, that it was simply a cute name for a protein shake or something. "Ant-Lion Milk! Be Focus!" It seemed like your typical start-up crap.

But when I visited the factory, there were thousands of giant ant-lions. Giant. Big as horses. And while I'd never really given much thought to the implications of the fact that ant-lions aren't mammals, I put plenty of thought into those implications right then and there.

Turns out there's a delicate process to milking something that's not a mammal, and the resulting product isn't so much milk as a secretion of various glands. I mean, so is milk, but this "milk" could only charitably be called "milk" and a lawsuit later in the process enshrined those quotation marks in stone, let me tell you. The FDA have very strict rules about what can and can't be called milk, and while this company maintained that those rules were ignorance being promoted by Big Dairy, thus far no judge has sided with them.

It may have something to do with the consistency of the "milk," which must be treated with various solvents in order to be made liquid enough to be put into bottles. To say nothing of the reagents which must be used to keep the "milk" from eating through glass, plastic, metal, and ceramic when it's in a liquid state. But, "Be focus!" and so forth, and apparently a big part of "being focus" is screaming and retching.

In any case, I didn't keep the job long because I was eaten rather quickly by one of the giant ant-lions. I'm typing this from inside its stomach, in fact. If you read this, please send help, or at least don't drink ant-lion milk.

Sorry, "milk."