Inside the Human House, a community of lobsters is preparing the day’s meals. Some of them are wearing aprons, and some of them are sitting down with their families, who titter excitedly in chairs as they’re shown the humans in cages.

“I think I’ll take… that one,” a large lobster says, pointing with its claw at the small naked man inside the tank.

“A very good choice,” the waiter lobster says. “And for you, miss?”

“Oh,” she says, “I don’t know. Any one of them will do.”

“Very well.” The waiter then takes the menus from the family and goes back into the kitchen to deliver the order. Upon handing it back, he asks if he can look at their process for cooking the meals.

“Of course,” the head chef lobster replies. He gets out one human, grabbing him by the head, who’s screaming and yelling and begging to be let go, and the lobster, with a pair of scissors, cuts his hands off. “There,” he says, moving on to the next one. “This is to make sure they don’t kill each other in the tank. They do that when they’re stressed sometimes. But they’re supposed to be alive when we cook them, so that they’re served fresh. As fresh as can be, anyway.”

The waiter lobster nods. “Do they feel anything?”

“No,” the chef says as he puts the second screaming human back. “Their brains only have the mechanisms for retaining memory and performing logical reasoning. They’re primitive for everything else, in other words. They’re not equipped to deal with pain. Anything that looks like a reaction to pain is purely mechanical. A reflex.”

The waiter nods again, and the chef puts them into a see-through bowl. Then he pours boiling water into the bowl and seals the lid shut as it sizzles inside.

“They’re sure moving an awful lot in there,” the waiter says. “Are you sure they’re not feeling anything?”

“Yes, I’m certain of it.”

“They’re being quite loud.”

“Yes,” the waiter says. “They are. I have a timer, though. Would you like to sit in the other room and wait this thing out? We can watch sports in the meantime.”

“Yes,” the waiter replies. “That sounds like a good idea.” And then the two of them sit in the next room, waiting approximately four minutes as the humans dissolve, banging on the glass, screaming and drowning in the boiling water.