WHAT AN ENGULFING STORY INDEED

By Todd Guilmette

"Yes, but this coffee tastes like shit," the man opposite me said suddenly. "But this coffee shop sucks more."

I turned around and looked up from my paper. The man was looking at me inquisitively, obviously expecting an answer. Just to make sure it was me he was addressing and to be sure he didn’t have fucked-up eyes and was looking across the room at the beautiful ivory ashtray, I spoke.

"Are you addressing me, pray-tell?" I asked. Indeed, he was looking at me because he replied, "Of course I am. Who the hell else would I be looking at?"

Slightly taken aback at the bluntness of his reply, I proceeded to glance around the room. There were, indeed, no other customers in the shoppe except for the short-order cook who was reading a magazine called "Anal Lesbians In Heat". Since the cook was also present, I decided to inform the man opposite of me of his existence and that he would probably love to have an in-depth conversation with that degenerate.

"Hey!" the man said, whipping himself around to speak to the cook. The cook looked up absently out of his magazine.

"You suck!" the man yelled, then turned back to me. The cook shook his head, mumbled something under his breath, and then appeared to be struggling for air. Engulfed in his reading, he convulsed and promptly suffocated.

"Um," I began. "The cook just died."

The man looked off again. "Indeed," he said, the proceeded to walk behind the counter and retrieve some eggs out of the icebox. He nudged the cook off the chair he was sitting on, and the cook rolled off like a light beachball inside the magazine, bouncing a bit. The cook landed by a stack of sugar bags.

I could shortly smell the odor of frying chicken embryos. Having had just about enough of this mess, I called out to the man and asked just what was he doing cooking eggs when the cook was dead only a couple of minutes and shouldn’t we call an ambulance at least?

"Of course, these eggs are going to suck badly too," the man proclaimed. "Because they came out of that refrigerator and they are in this little café so naturally they will taste like shit."

"Are you perfectly mad?" I asked, incredulous at his manner.

He stopped for a moment. "Well, I think there might be a crowd or two of rogue brain cells up in here that would agree with you. But the rest of them are perfectly in agreement about this particular situation."

He stared into a space somewhere between the soft-serve machine and the jukebox, eyes glazed over.

"There was, though, a time when chaos reigned throughout my palate and I then couldn’t decide whether to go with the roast beef on rye with the simply delectable French mustard, or with the eggs benedict with hash browns and those little sausages on the side. Have you even noticed how much of our meal ticket looks quite like a phallus?"

I blinked.

"I mean, those little pork sausages look like little toasty dicks. Little putzes, no doubt, but still. And hot dogs. And pickles and squashes and watermelons. Of course I think those little sausages are to make the men feel better about their manhood. I mean, those things are little fuckers and pretty much any man would be subconsciously comparing that little piece of beef with their own and then feeling a sort of tangential pride over that little triumph. ‘Oh, my dick is bigger than that sausage! Heh-heh-heh-heh!’" His voice became a stereotype of retarded intelligence, a laughing goofball.
"Are you fucking CRAZY?" I yelled.

The man must have snapped out of his little reverie because he replied. "Of course I am. My brain auspiciously left me. I think it was a year ago in June. It was definitely a Monday. On a safari to the Ozarks. Those goddamn hillbillies can be quite interesting to study. Did you know that their mating practices are quite abnormal compared to—"

"No! I don’t want to know."
"Anyway," the man said after a moment. "You want something to much on, asshole?"

I gaped.

My silence was evidently disturbing to him, so he threw a bag of Cheetos at me. The bag landed a few feet short. Then he threw some Funyuns at me, following that up with a small packet of Suzie-Q’s. Those landed in my lap.

"Stop that!" I yelled. He looked at me like I was a smoking banana turd. "Who are you? You come in to my favorite little café and then out of nowhere, you tell me that you don’t like the coffee—"

"It sucks."

"I KNOW that it sucks, brisquet-brains! And then you tell the cook that he sucks, and then the cook dies. And then you tell me that your brain is on vacation."

The man opened his mouth to answer, but I froze him in mid-consonant. "All of this I find something very distasteful, and I would much appreciate it if you would leave the immediate vicinity!"

The man continued to look at me, head slightly cocked, like I was somehow speaking Bulgarian. "Would you like me to leave?"

In frustration, my head lost all muscular control, lolled around for a bit and then made a crash-landing upon the laminated imitation-wood table.

"OK. I Will."

I raised my head in time to see him leaving the shoppe. He stopped just outside the door and raised his head, sniffing, as if to catch a random scent floating about.

"But the coffee still sucks," he said, and left.

I looked around, sat up.

The cook was on the floor.

My coffee was still on the table, and still hot.

I drank it and read my newspaper.

A number of minutes later my concentration was broken by a stranger’s voice speaking in horrified fascination. "What the hell happened to the cook?"

I didn’t even look up. "I don’t know, don’t ask me. I think my brain went on safari quite a while back."

I could hear the stranger avail himself of the phone and start to call 911 when I saw the edges of my newspaper start to curl up and try to surround me.

"Oh no, not THIS time," I said, and crumpled the entire paper up. I got up and threw it out. "There’s no engulfing to be done when there are so many safaris about."

Copyright 1993, 2001 by Todd Guilmette