This is one of the Five Winners of the Waffle House Contest in Volume 7 of SumFlux. Come find the menu here: carte du jour.
The Waffle House is where I come to swim.
The syrup is the right consistency. Thin and tragic.
Before I dive in, I push in the door, push past the regulars, find my booth. I sit in the third one on the left, by the windows. Never at the counter.
Unspoken rule is if you’re here by yourself, you sit at the counter. Not me. I need the one scooch, two scooch stutter across the bench so I know I’m ready, and I need the window so I can see the sign. That’s key. If I can’t see the sign then I might as well have stayed home, taken a swim in my coffee or the pretty mouth of the neighbor across the courtyard. But then I’d miss the syrup and I’d miss the sign. Gotta have the sign.
The slap-clatter of the plate echoes in my empty gut. I don’t even need to place my order. They know me here. They know what I want. They bring it, silent but not subservient. I’m not the one demanding we bend a knee. That’s egg-face down below.
The syrup slides out of its glass cradle, my thumb pressed to the plastic tab of the lid like it’s the doomsday switch, pressure informed by desperation, hard edges making dents in my thumb. I let go, lick errant syrup from a ragged nail, rough edges catching on my tongue.
Behind me, the regulars talk too loud, laugh too long. Around me, phones ding and ring and ping and prod and scrape and gouge at eyes and ears until everyone’s senses are dull. In front of me, the booth flickers bright red and empty, then full of egg-face and their sunny yolks staring, then red and empty again. I hate it both ways but empty’s the hardest.
Before me is my plate. The syrup’s pooling on the white milk glass, ready, waiting to feel my skin, reaching, craving, hoping I’ll dive in. And I do. Sink straight into that golden, treacherous pond. It welcomes me like an old enemy or a new friend, cautious but hungry.
I think I’ll glide straight through to the bottom, but that autonomic ache in my lungs makes me spasm and kick. So I stretch through the surface, a chick out of an egg, syrup clinging to every crevice, hugging every hair, smothering slowly the way it likes to. No quick death for me at the Waffle House. I have to swim first.
I lift an arm, syrup stretching in tawny strands, longing to return me to itself. I take a breath, syrup in my mouth, making my teeth clang a candied warning. Syrup in my lungs, so sweet even as it coats and suffocates, pink alveoli going sepia.
I kick and kick, death spasms or a danse macabre, it’s hard to tell, until finally I slow and still. Roll onto my back, force my lids open through the syrup membrane designed to hold them shut. Above me is the sign, the only survivor after the window and the booth dissolved in sugar solution oblivion.
The sight of those eleven yellow tiles is all I need. They rise in the sky, square teeth in a perfect smile, a static semaphore message, building blocks inverted, pointing down.
Permission granted, I sink below the surface, give in to the thick slither of syrup. Let it consume me. Let it fill me until I’m a fleshy syrup balloon floating down instead of up.
Down to egg-face and their yolky eyes and bacon mouth and albumen skin, pockmarked by an uneven cook. They wait at the altar. Patient.
Because there’s no quick death at the Waffle House. It’s a slow slide, a long glissade to oblivion.
I resurrect on the griddle-cake stairs, cough up gummy bands of syrup and watch them sink through the crisp surface to infiltrate the softness underneath. I laugh at that, always do, to think how fragile this place is, how permeable. I could tear through it all if only I were strong enough, if only the Waffle House syrup didn’t flow straight from the river Lethe.
When I get like this and start to remember a different life and another way through, I look to the sign. Eleven yellow tiles, a symphony of fleabag lighthouses in the dark, an undecet radiating requiems for the person I was and will be. A shy dozen reminding me that there is only here. Only now. Egg-face only wants the present. Only wants everything. And I’ll give it to them.
I crawl on my hands and knees up the stacked waffle stairs, fingers and toes grasping for the edges between checkerboard holes. Syrup, thin and inevitable, seeps down from above, soaking through my skin, saturating my marrow, until my veins run golden with the sacrifices that went before me. And I’m not filled this time, like a sinking balloon. No, this time I am the syrup. Sweet. Sweeter. Sweetest.
Cresting the last step and egg-face is there, white milk glass altar empty but not clean, shining in the light of the sign. Eleven times aglow, eleven times awake. 11:11. Make a wish. See the vision.
Egg-face has been waiting, but I can tell they won’t wait any longer. Already their bacon lips go limp, their skin rubbery. Their yolky eyes are running in sunshine tears.
The altar is high and I’m low-slung like a syrup slug, but I manage to pull myself up. One scooch, two, three, no more to get the position just right. I settle, wobble back and forth, syrup sloshing, an aureate ocean between my ears and behind my ribs and in my feet.
I look at egg-face and wonder what it’d be like to feel their hen-fruit cheeks between my teeth, their sowbelly mouth in mine. But the sign stands tall behind them in the nothing sky. Eleven doors waiting to be opened and only one key.
Egg-face lifts the flatware knife, blunt, a utensil made for pushing food onto forks, not for taking lives. There’s no quick death at the Waffle House after all. It flashes pyrite before touching down on my belly and after everything it’s only a gentle kiss of the knife’s tiny teeth and I burst, a syrup tsunami that rushes over egg-face, subsuming what’s left of them, ecstasy in their over-easy eyes.
Down the waffle stack stairs and out into the syrup sea, every particle of me mixing with every particle of that infinite ocean. It’s a slow dissolution. No quick death. Not here. Never here.
And on every mote of me the Waffle House light shines down. Eleven stars, raining their light from the past on my million presents.
There’s no coming back from this even though I know I’ll be here again tomorrow. Ready to swim. Third booth on the left. Next to the window so I can see the sign. Slowly dying at the Waffle House.
Sum Flux - Volume 7
We received a whopping helping of thirty-eight submissions to the contest, each judged anonymously, and the range was banquetorial. And yet, somehow, every single one of these wildly different Waffle Houses was shot with the same cinematic filter. You could almost believe thirty-eight writers had met up under the same 3am fluorescents.
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I feel sick. This is awesome
Death by syrup and eggs, majestic prose and atmosphere