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.
I am a stalwart guardian in garish red - Pantone 7626C for legal purposes. I am the observer and the observed. A million different lives float around me like driftwood. A million hands squeeze my shapely thighs. A million tongues on my sphincter, even though they know they shouldn’t, licking my succulent tang from their fingers after I spew for them. I always give it up when they ask. When I’m empty, the waitresses force the others on me, marry us hole to hole. They come into me, filling me up to my neck, my head, until it spills down my face and I have to bathe in the sink. Until I’m made whole from their parts.
But what am I?
This morning, plump lips suck on a cigarette. The smell foreign, heady and magical. An outside smell. The waitress with the always-coloring kid in booth two is annoyed. All fluster and hands on hips pointing her finger out the window. The man sighs, his mouth o-ing sensually, beautiful in his frustration, and drops the smolder into cold coffee. I want those lips to anoint me, share their taste, lick me dry so I might keep a bit of him inside me. Instead the man’s hairy knuckles grab my waist and take me, hard and strong, until I drench his plate in pleasure. When he licks it up, not wasting a single drop, eyes locked on my curves, I color a deeper, off-brand red.
They always leave after.
Later, the woman in rags stands on a cushioned bench seat, holding me aloft and declaring me 32 ounces of genetically modified non-Newtonian fluid in injection-molded dinosaur bones to patrons who look the other way, uninterested in holy proclamations. She draws equations on napkins, cheap paper tearing, and spurts me across the table to measure the distance with her knuckle. I mourn the waste. She mutters shear-thinning fluid between black teeth and plays a ceaseless off-kilter rhythm with her fingers on the tabletop. How do I thin? What shears me? What holy scripture does this woman write? I feel dangerous with new knowledge, on the cusp of true understanding.
Could she show me the truth?
She leaves without paying her bill. No one cares. The sad waiter with the long beautiful hair who doesn’t shower enough wipes up my sprayed secretions before they harden. And oh, I want to harden for him. To watch him peel dried juices off with straining fingers. To carry slivers of me home under his nails where we might finally shower together. I could make him clean, if he only let me.
I am always the one who stays.
Mid-afternoon, the kids pour me on everything. And I oblige dutifully. Happy to be used. Young hands not strong enough to squeeze me yet, so mother doles me out in even spurts on hash browns, eggs, sausages, pancakes until everything is tinged red. WAKE UP. Ketchup is for breakfast. They chatter incessantly and eat me by the spoonful, sling me on every surface, create a forbidden mixture with hot syrup that makes me drip in anticipation. If only I could taste that concoction. Their mother breathes in staccato anxiety and pays bills on her phone.
Am I just a thing to be used?
In the evening, a man is shot in the parking lot. I hear those words after. I do not know what they mean, but when he crashes through the door after a loud popping sound and peeling tires across pavement, the waitress screams the bad scream, drops the plastic coffee pitcher, places frantic calls, and I know it’s something that shouldn’t happen. He flops into my booth, and I watch him spill out. Hot red pouring between compressed fingers, staining his oversized white shirt.
Are we the same on the inside? Just different containers for the same fluid? Is he shear-thinning, too?
His liquid oozes across the vinyl-cushioned bench. It smells hot candied iron. I imagine all of myself releasing in one great spurt. Blowing out across the table all that’s inside me. Exploding. Is that ecstasy? He turns pale quickly and convulses lightly. Then. Nothing. No more breathing, no more groaning, no more pressure applied to his leaking hole. An empty shell. The waitress hugs herself and cries, standing in spilled coffee.
Is this how I look when I’m empty too?
I wonder if they could marry us, fill him back up with my insides and make him move again. I wish someone would squeeze me into him. Fill him to the brim with every ounce littered across these tables.
Would he be one of us, then?
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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Incredible Ian! Loved this one. I felt deeply squeezed from within the bottle. We are all but condiments making sense of viscous fluids.
Smut, existential questioning, with slices of humanity AND a thriller in the background? This has it all with brio, congratulations my friend