Serial Vlogger: Part Fifty-Four

A horror novel in tiny slices

The next person to enter the room was a tall, regular-sized man. In fact, he was bordering on thin, yet he was very buff. He had muscles on his arms and legs, and he could have had a six-pack if he hadn’t been hooked on mukbangs.

Marissa recognized him instantly.

“You’re Smooth Move !” Marissa said with a gasp. Her head was spinning with all the celebrities around her. She knew them all, inside out. Had followed them all for years and now she was in a room with them. She was going to mukbang with them. She was going to lose her mind.

“I sure am, but you can call me Tom. Most people do in real life. On camera, though, Smooth Move is fine. No biggie if you slip and call me Tom. I don’t give a shit.” Tom shook Marissa’s hand. His grip was firm.

Tom’s deal was that he used to be over four hundred pounds, but after having two heart attacks before the age of thirty, he dropped the weight by working out. His favourite activity is jogging, but he also lifts weights and does archery. His absolute favourite activity is eating. So it was hard for him to deny himself as an athlete, and he didn’t want to get huge again, so in a manner of holding himself accountable, he created a YouTube channel. He performs mukbangs of insane amounts of food but only once or twice a month.

The amount of food the man could put away was insane, though Marissa sometimes wondered if he really ate all that or if there was some creative editing going on. No one really knew, but even the amount people could actually see him eat, sometimes live, was still massively more than regular human beings. He liked to do food challenges and world records and, of course, had millions of followers watching his crazy stunts.

He was more like a circus than a sideshow, while the other mukbangers were part of the online sideshow of societal deviants.

Now that Tom had arrived, Luigi looked more relaxed. Everyone wore white, and everyone looked like a million dollars, as if they were going to the Academy Awards instead of mukbanging.

After Luigi had explained a couple of the shot setups, he asked hair, makeup, and wardrobe to go in for any last minute touch ups. Tom stood beside Marissa.

“I looked you up once I found out I would be working with you,” Tom said. Marissa blushed.

“You did?”

“Of course. I always want to know who I’m working with as I almost exclusively work alone or very rarely with a buddy.”

“I’ve noticed that.”

“You’re so lucky you found the Slice of Life people. They do it all for you, right?”

“So far…”

“It’s like an agency, but they also sponsor most of these productions.”

“Oh, I thought they were mostly an agency.”

“You never noticed on the credits how they produce and do almost everything else. Slice of Life is everywhere. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of their programs don’t end up on bigger streaming services like Netflix or Crave or Prime!”

“You think so?”

“That’s the goal for this movie…this thing we’re doing today. A short promo reel for something bigger.”

“Wow.”

“You’re lucky you got to walk right into this.”

“Well…”

“You did. The rest of us, we had to grind it out for years, making daily, sometimes many times a day content, trying to keep up with the whims of the logarithms and the audience. But Slice of Life figured it all out, for you, for Georges, and for many of their other shows.”

“Good for them.”

“Yeah, I’m not jealous, mind you. It was a different world when I started out, back when I did my weight loss journey there was really only Discovery channel or The Learning Channel on TV. You couldn’t find much online unless it was fetishized.”

“Well, hate to break it to you, but you’re fetishized.”

“I know. I’m well aware. And I’ve totally embraced it. That’s why I do the mukbangs. It’s for the feeders. They pay super big bucks to watch me eat. The sins of gluttony, envy, lust, and greed all rolled into one. You can even add sloth in there. Actually, pride and wrath get to play too,” Tom laughed. “They’re all there.”

Marissa nodded and stared over at Luigi. She didn’t want to listen to weirdo Tom anymore. She just wanted to get the show on the road.