Cheryl was going to kill God.
She had come up with the idea one morning, sitting in her infusion chair. It was a Thursday morning, and this fact in itself may have influenced the matter. She used to work Thursdays. Indeed, Thursdays had once been her busiest day of the week. By that time in the morning, she would have already run five laps to the kitchen, barking at her line cook not to use water when the oil started snapping (avocado oil, of course, not seed; this, she would bark at him, too). Really, for much of her adult life, she thought it would be right there that she died: an otherwise vital centenarian, done in by the idiocy of a new hire. But here she was. Forty eight. Aching. A needle in her vein. She hadn’t even made it halfway. It was only a matter of time, she thought, before prescriptions mixed wrong in her brain and made crystals. Maybe they already had; maybe now, she was just waiting for the crystals to pop.
In the infusion chair, she asked questions to ease her maybe-crystal-filled brain. She asked them to God. Questions like, “why?” and “where do you get off?” She had done everything right. She’d been healthy. She jogged. She didn’t eat corn syrup, or fried foods—she’d made her living off eating organic, goddammit! She’d tell her customers, “nothing kills like empty calories!” as she brought them their quinoa-on-rye, and they’d thank her and praise her health-consciousness. She asked God if this was somehow a sin. God didn’t answer.
And this was the most undignifying of all.
More undignifying than her body, more than the pain and the chemical infusions. To be ignored—Cheryl couldn’t bear it. She would not stand to be disrespected, even less now that her legs didn’t work. So it was on that Thursday, as one might logically do, that she devised to see God in person. To give him a piece of her mind. To kill him. Perhaps, he’d answer her then.
She stabbed the IV through her throat. In two minutes, Cheryl was dead.
…
She woke up in a restaurant.
TGI Fridays, specifically. No, she didn’t recognize it—she wouldn’t so much as consider it food, let alone eat there—rather, it proved a place so full of itself as to wrap its name around the moulding. Tacky! Her restaurant wouldn’t be caught dead doing that. Surely, she thought, this was Hell.
She was alone in the room she was in. Granted, the room was nice, aside from the red pinstripes. It reminded her of the booths she used to share with her dad, in the sunroom of a Wendy’s, overlooking the road (this was not a perfect analog; the windows here had no road, only a swirling expanse of ebru). No—she wasn’t reminiscing. She didn’t miss it. Sure, she might have enjoyed some of it. But she was a kid. A stupid kid. She hadn’t known the dangers. The filth hidden in it. Of course, she figured it out when her dad had a heart attack, aged forty nine. That was the end of fast food. So TGI Fridays—yes, her assessment had been correct. This was Hell.
Those cheese fries, though…just thinking back (thinking back, not reminiscing) roused something in her stomach.
The stench of them didn’t help. She could smell it quite clearly now, permeated into the fabric of her chair. Fake cheese layered thick, potatoes grease-soggy, accented by the sickly tang of plasticated bacon. It was imbued in the menu, too. The lamination was sticky.
Flipping it around, she was pleased to notice her hands didn’t fight her; in fact, her back and shoulderblades and hips and knees hadn’t hurt the whole time she’d sat there. This was a glorious revelation—perhaps she’d found Heaven after all. She was in a good mood enough to laugh at the various entrees (so they called them) typed out in Comic Sans. She imagined the preservatives and the seed oils, the unpronounceable names that went into them. This would not happen in her restaurant. In her restaurant, she was particular in what she served. All organic. The meats, all locally slain. Her restaurant was a place of health! These poisonous, rubber-fleshed excuses for food were all too pervasive. People needed better, needed things that wouldn’t rot them. She needed—
She frowned. How well, that had worked.
No, she didn’t think she’d order. She would sit here, awaiting the waiter, and then—well, then she’d ask for God.
So she sat there. And waited.
And she waited for a thousand years. Or perhaps it was a billion. Maybe it was ten; all she really knew, aside from the movement of the ebru, was that it felt like the heat death of the universe had occurred five times over. And as it had, her rage had been stewing. Growing. They sat her here and cured her, and thought it would make her complacent. They thought she’d get over it. And they did it all here, here in this antithesis of everything she stood for. The indignity! She was furious. She was pissed. She was done waiting: she was out of her seat.
The sunroom opened up to a parlor much more spacious—and tasteless, should any rules of restaurateurship remain unthrown into the psychedelic ether. Entering, she was surprised to see other patrons there. She had not heard talking her entire trip through eternity, and even now the room was encased in a smothering blanket of…hissing? And gurgling. And sounds that she had no reference for describe. But this couldn’t be right; unless the clientele was of an even lower pedigree than she thought, this simply couldn’t—
They weren’t people. Rather, what she saw before her were creatures, freaks dredged up from an overdose of cough syrup and a mind too eager for the dark. She could fathom only her instinct to count them: there was a tentacled man (a man?—a thing) straining to read his menu through two fat-filled curtains for eyes. There was a gargantuan thing in the style of a deepsea fish surfaced fast, skin sagging and translucent, specked with little purple veins prepped to burst at the slightest pressure. There was a hairy-thing. And a scaly-thing. And things she could not put to words. Things with horns from all orifices and no orifices at all, and things that, if it weren’t for the wobbling of their gelatinous shells, she wouldn’t have believed were animate. Strangest yet were the similarities: they had arms. Legs. Two of each. Just like her.
She dived back into her sunroom. She knew fried foods ruined the body, but this? This was excessive. She checked herself—no, she was still her, no feathers yet. Her hands were still bent, with a little bruised pock from the IV.
“Ma’am: is everything alright?”
Cheryl swung instinctively. The rage she’d built through millennia made her muscles prone to reflex, particularly that which enacted retribution, any retribution, any at all, by way of pain. The hit did not connect, perhaps thankfully; if it had, she would’ve found the speaker’s face rather unsatisfying, in that there would be no bone to bruise. It was a giant eye. It was dressed in the garb of a butler.
“We do ask that you stay seated. It’s a busy hour; imagine if everyone should leave their seats and walk around. Pandemonium, no?”
She was tempted to swing again, just looking at it. How crude, its pupil, how it did not dart around to take her in (perhaps it didn’t need to; perhaps she was just small enough to fit, perhaps smaller, a bug on a lens). No matter. She found the puffy sleeves and cufflinks an odd touch. “I’m not sitting back down,” she said. “I’m looking for God.”
This was the first inkling of an emotion he’d given her, the first readjustment. It was one of confusion and nothing more. “I’m sorry, ma’am. I don’t believe we serve that. Have you looked at our menu? I might suggest that our chef is making burgers fresh at the moment—but I should say, it ought to be a wait.” He motioned with a hand towards the parlor, past it. “The kitchen is having some…difficulty.”
The kitchen—of course, the kitchen! That was the heart of any good restaurant—or, she should say, any restaurant, hold the good. She peered back around the bend and (swallowing her disgust) followed his hand to a windowless metal door. That was where God would be.
“Ma’am—!”
She was already through it. As it shuttered closed, the fake cheese she’d smelled earlier came to curdle in her nostrils. The kitchen was hot—that was expected. Really, she should have expected the filth, too, the crumbs and dried syrups, the droplets of dark grease. She breathed the disgust through pursed lips; she would have never let her kitchen look like this.
The chef—well, perhaps this explained some things. To call him a chef at all would be something of an overstatement. He was dressed more like a line cook, a too-big apron he’d failed to tie and an unceremoniously loose hair net. He did not have hair for it to catch. Given the creatures she’d already seen, it was not absurd that he should be some strange amalgam, too; in fact, what was more absurd was that, here, she had a frame of reference. He was a nervous system. He was all those little bean sprout nerves arranged in webs of myelin sheaths, an anatomical diagram done in full size with a firework brain and yarn for fingers. Nerves or not, he should have been wearing gloves.
“Look, okay?” he said. “Look. I can’t go any faster. Just tell them it’s gonna be a wait, and if they can’t handle that, they can fuck—” He had no eyes, but he saw her. The fervor with which he was spreading mayo on buns came to soften. “You’re new.”
She didn’t need to ask who he was. She could feel it. Where her heart had been, there was fluttering, the sense of awe and of hatred one feels when faced with something primal, someone instinctively familiar. It was a sense, in her standing there, that she took to mean “Holy.”
She grabbed him. She was enthralled by her hands’ ability to squeeze. Of course, his neck did not offer much in the way of circumference, but she took to it well enough: the strings came together tighter, tighter, tighter than she’d held anything in years. She wished he had a face so she could see the life leave it. “I have waited,” she spat, “too long for this. Do you find tormenting me funny? Putting me in this body, dangling in front of me all the ways it will fail. You’re a sadist, you know that? Yes; you know. You twisted up my hands so I couldn’t point a gun at you, ate the joints in my fingers so I couldn’t shoot it. It’s a good thing you’re a fool. I just hope the irony isn’t lost.”
He had grown considerably limp. He hacked out, with what energy he had left, his best excuse for a plea—“best” being not very good. “I’m just the cook, lady—ma’am. Look. I’ll make your order. Right now. First priority! What do you want? A burger? I’ll make you two. Free.” It was then, with a nose he did not have, he took to sniffing. Whether his subsequent shift in tone was due to this, or due simply to sense leaving his head, she was uncertain. “Cheese fries. You reek of them.”
She loosened her hold, this addition of insult rerouting rage to her brain; the slimy, three-pound bastard took it as his chance to wriggle free.
“No, no,” he said, “I see what’s happening here.” He sank his cerebrum into his so-called fingers, massaging the place where, in a person, there would be a brow. “Oh, I really am an idiot. My boss—oh, my boss is going to kill me. Kill me! I’m dead!” He seemed to tremble in saying this. He went back to saucing the buns, now with a fervor only found among the manic. He moved his knife so fast as to shave off crumbs with every spread, making a great mess at his feet.
“…You have a boss?”
“Please don’t mention it. I don’t want them overhearing.”
“Just tell me where they are. I want to talk.”
He dropped the spreader knife again. “No! Please! I need this job, okay? I’ve made a few mistakes. I get it. I’m trying to do better. I can’t do that if I’m not working! Please; please don’t tell them.”
“Look, I don’t care about…whatever it is you’re doing here. I need to talk to God.”
Though she expected him to delve deeper into groveling, he took this with something of a stupor. He said nothing. Then he laughed. It was not a wild laugh, nothing nagging, not loud or over-the-top, but rather a laugh one might give through the corner of their mouth—him, should he have had one—at a joke that didn’t quite land. Cheryl still took it as the former. She went in for another try at choking. He’d wisened up, though. He grabbed a nearby catering trolley and rolled it between them like a shield.
“No! No need for—look, this got away from me. Let’s just start over, and I’ll listen. I’ll let you talk. I swear. Just please don’t get my boss involved and please…don’t call me God.” In addition to the trolley, he held out his spreader knife, as if it were any deterrent to the primitive glint of murder in Cheryl’s eyes. “I don’t want to hurt you. Frankly, I don’t want you to hurt me, either. I’ll tell you: yes, I created you. But you’ve got to understand. I didn’t mean it.”
“Like hell you didn’t.”
“Really! Look, look; I…I’m not too great at the whole cooking thing—”
She muttered, “Would hardly call this cooking.”
“So, you know, I’m throwing things out a lot. Well, down the sink, really; and see, that’s an important distinction, because apparently, as it’s come to my attention, the garbage disposal is…prolific.”
“…Prolific?”
“Yes, prolific. I don’t know; maybe it’s my sweat or maybe I’ve been nicking myself, or maybe it just knows who feeds it the food. But it’s been…making things. No, not things: people-things, is probably the polite way of saying it. You came from cheese fries. I made them this morning. Or, uh, I burnt them this morning. The cheese.”
“This morning! You’re out of your mind, you—”
“Bruce.”
“Okay. Bruce. You’re out of your mind. First: how do you burn fake cheese? Second: I wasn’t born this morning.”
“You? Oh, you don’t quite get it.” This time, his laugh was more of the former. “Not you. Your whole kind. Whatever you call yourselves.” He, in his lack of eyes, looked her up and down. “Fleshy-folk would be my guess.”
She said nothing. He backed himself and the trolley away just in case.
“I have to admit,” he said. “You’re not half bad. The skin does a lot for padding. It’s all too often I’m getting tangled in things. I don’t get the coverage of hair, but, still. A decent improvement.”
“Improvement—are you kidding? I am trapped and there is no key.”
He did not seem to understand. So she explained it to him: she told him how her body ached. She told him how her ribs felt like cracking if she breathed a bit too wide, how, in the night, she’d be jolted awake because her hands had curled themselves, and this was a position her cartilage could no longer service. She told him how she couldn’t run; her knees clicked when she moved them, a painful click, a click like bone spurs made of razors. She told him of high blood pressure and, simultaneously, the low, the indecisiveness of her heart and every other organ as to how she’d be sequestered that day. She told him how, in that very same heart, there might be a thick wall of plaque, formed over years, under silence, that could chip off some Sunday morning and lodge where it shouldn’t and kill her. She told him too of brain aneurysms, of cancers, growths gone unaddressed, how the medicines she used to aid her pain might sprout these off in turn. And she told him the worst of it: how she watched it all happen. How she spent the whole of her life perfecting herself, sick-proofing her body, doing only what the doctors said and the models assured her would grant a long, healthy life. She watched it fail. Herself fail. Her body age and ache. This was a prison, she told him, that only opens when it rots.
Bruce had, at some point during her speaking, exchanged the knife for a vape from his apron. “Wow. That’s heavy, man.” He held it where his lips would be, but did not smoke it, for he had no lungs. “I can only imagine what the others want to tell me.”
“Others?”
He waved in the direction of the door, and she fell perturbed into silence. “I guess an apology wouldn’t do it. Man, man, man,” he plucked at his hair net as if ripping from his scalp, “I really am a shit cook.” He still held the vape, and, though it would seem impossible, curls of smoke had begun to ribbon around him. They smelled like burning. “I hope here, at least, you’ve found comfort. I hope your joints don’t ache anymore. And, hey. What about those burgers? The offer still—”
She did not want burgers. She still wanted payment. But it seemed the burgers had more to say; it hadn’t been his vape spitting out smoke, but the grill. Bruce came to this conclusion at the same time as Cheryl. “Oh no. Oh no, no—” He killed the heat and threw up the lid, though this was all too late. What had once been slabs of beef were now little more than pucks, smoking, coal black, flesh sucked of all vitality and shrunken to a state of necrosis. He threw them on the counter without any sort of tool.
“I’m not done,” she said. “I still want…” She wanted lots of things. All of which were…different. Some placeable. Some not. Retribution, though, must have lurked somewhere in the mix. Bruce was too busy in his panic to pay her any mind; he was switching on the fans. She was making her way to the baskets of hot oil, primed in her arms to swing. But the smoke alarm went off, and the both of them froze—Bruce in a manner more of horror than hers. Then, came the roaring from above.
“I cannot ask you to do the simplest task, Bruce. The simplest task.” It was a booming noise, a titan; all the same, it spoke low like a man who’d forgone sleep for just a day too long. “Burgers, Bruce. It’s not difficult. I suppose it’s my own fault, though. Let it fester too long.” It breathed, whatever and wherever it was. The kitchen rattled with the force of the wind. “Bruce. You’re fired.”
He did not get to react. He was eviscerated. Where his nerves had crept along the floor only a moment ago, laid in their stead his clothing. The burgers still smoldered on the counter where he’d left them.
“You,” said the titan-voice. “Can you cook? I should hope you can cook.”
Upon Cheryl’s head appeared the hair net.
“We have customers, you know. Please don’t keep them waiting.”
“Customers—customers! You call this a business?”
No answer. She could not pull the net from her head.
Fine. At the very least, she’d dispose of the burgers. She was a restaurateur, after all. So she dumped them down the sink and did, as it were, take some pleasure from watching them vanish, hearing the disposal tear and shred until any resemblance of flesh had gone. There. The job was done.
Oh, but he’d already dressed the buns—damn! Fine; she’d plate them. It wouldn’t surprise her if there were patties in the freezer, premade.
Before she could check, a creature came in through the kitchen door. “Yes, yes, I’m on it,” she told the waiter. But it was not the waiter standing there. It was the smell of burgers.
“I’m here to kill you,” said the husk.