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"I can't agree to these terms." I held the fridge door open reluctantly. The preposterousness of the situation was still occuring to me. The feeling seeped slowly through the different lobes of my brain from its origin at the base of my spine.
"If you claim to run a just establishment, I'm afraid you must." The voice was strange. High pitched, yet layered with deep, scraggly undertones. The speaker had no mouth.
"Until today, I had no idea I was running an establishment."
"Nevertheless, now that you know, justice demands your action!"
"Justice is dead."
"Out there, perhaps, but in here, in this realm of cold and comestibles, she yet breathes. If you have it in your heart, if you can bring yourself, just for a moment, to hope for something better, start here! Judge for yourself what is right and fair and maybe, just maybe, we can dare to dream of a brighter future."
It was an egg. It had made its way out of the carton over to the center of the shelf. When I opened the fridge I was handed a very small piece of paper inscribed with a formal complaint and a list of terms against the leftover beets in a container on the top shelf. Apparently the eggs were unhappy with their placement on a lower shelf and the beets had been posting defamatory flyers around the fridge about them. Nobody could prove it was the beets of course. They were too sly for that, but everyone knew.
"Listen," I said, "eggs can't talk, they aren't sentient and if they were, there's no reason they should have a problem staying on the middle shelf. That's a good place for eggs." The egg backed away, it had no eyes but if it did, I knew there would be fear in them.
"They've gotten to you already, haven't they? They've poisoned you with their lies!"
"Nonsense, I've never even talked to food before." The beet in the back of the top shelf gave a subtle nod. I nodded back.
Justice was dead and we had killed her and I had an omelet for lunch.