by Eirik Gumeny
“Why?”
“What do you mean ‘why?’”
“I mean what the hell, man? No one needs that many pillows.”
“Maybe I do.”
“And maybe you’re a jackass.”
“Bring me my damn pillows, Thor.”
“You’re a tool, Charlie.”
Thor Odinson hung up the phone, and then he shook his head.
“Asshole better take his time healing,” muttered the thunder god, “‘cause I’m breaking some damn bones once he does.”
“Ease up, Thor,” said Catrina, her feet up on the desk. “He got a pole through his chest.”
“Yeah, but he doesn’t have to be such a douchebag about it.”
“He’s not being a douchebag. He’s legitimately incapacitated.”
“Legitimately incapacitated, my ass,” grumbled the former Norse God of Thunder. “If you’ve got such a soft spot for him, why don’t you go bring up the pillows?”
“Screw that, man,” said Catrina, pulling a face. “You answered the phone, not me. You do it.”
“This is bullshit,” he muttered as he walked out from behind the front desk.
THE END
(of this particular novel, anyway)
FREE-RANGE AND GRASS-FED
after the twenty-fourth apocalypse
Amber Romero-Patel’s insides were grumbling like a garbage disposal with a watermelon rind stuck in it. “I’m fucking starving, babe,” she said, her hand on her stomach. “We need to find somewhere to eat, like, yesterday.”
“I know, honey,” replied her wife, Carissa. “I’m going to pull over at the next place we see. You don’t have to remind me every mile.”
Amber’s insides grumbled like a man unhappy with his year-end bonus.
“I don’t think you understand how dire the situation is.”
“You were gnawing on the armrest for ten minutes. I get it.”
“That tasted terrible, by the way,” said Amber, eyeing the worn faux-leather and exposed cushioning between them. “Why don’t they just make armrests out of candy? Then we could avoid situations like this altogether.”
“Do you have any idea how sticky that would make things? What if I had to make a sharp turn to avoid a deer or something, and my elbow got stuck to the armrest? We’d be dead.”
“There’s no deer in the desert, dummy,” explained Amber, gesturing towards the hundreds of miles of desolate nothingness on all sides of the car. “Besides, I wouldn’t be hungry right now and that’s all that’s important.”
“You’re kind of awful when you’re hungry, you know that?”
“Go fuck yourself, sweetie.”
***
Three hours and two hundred miles later, Carissa Romero-Patel nudged her wife awake. “Hey, get up,” she said, poking her elbow into Amber’s ribs. “I think I finally found someplace.”
Amber blinked herself back into consciousness and saw a chrome-and-neon oasis sitting before them. The diner squatted like a squared, limited-seating-room beacon, a brilliant dive of an eatery reflecting the brutal high desert sunlight in a million directions like a halogen lightbulb to the women’s ravenous and mildly sleep-deprived moths.
“Five Girls Cafe,” she said. “Sounds promising.”
“Keep it in your pants, babe.”
Amber’s insides rumbled like a broken bowling alley ball return.
“No promises. I’m gonna do whatever I gotta do to get some god damned grub.”
***
Amber and Carissa Romero-Patel sat themselves in the booth nearest the kitchen door of the empty diner.
“Comfy,” said Amber, sliding into the booth and bouncing enthusiastically on the over-stuffed vinyl chair.
“Too soft,” replied Carissa, doing the exact opposite of bouncing on the over-stuffed vinyl chair.
“You do like it rough.” Amber grinned and lowered her eyes, staring at her wife like a tiger stares at a steak. A sexy steak.
“Are you hungry and horny?” asked Carissa.
“Yeah, kind of.”
“No wonder you’ve been so insufferable.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“And I love you anyway.”
“Ladies, if you’re done,” a sultry North English voice interrupted, “I’ll be having your orders now.”
The women turned toward the waitress who had silently appeared at the side of their table. She was tall and beautiful and completely out of place working in a worn-down diner like Five Girls Cafe. Her dark hair shot wildly into the air, with the forehead-section done into two weird conical spikes. The women turned to one another. There was something oddly familiar about her.
“Are you –” began Amber.
“A former judge on America’s Got Talent?” answered the waitress. “No, I’m not her.”
“I was going to say Spice Girl.”
“It’s the same lady, and I’m still not her.”
“Are you sure?” asked Carissa, furrowing her brow. “Because you look a lot like her. A lot.”
“There’s no shame in it,” added Amber, putting her hand on the arm of the server. “Lots of former reality stars are doing a lot worse than waitressing.”
“A lot.”
“I’m not Mel B., OK?” snapped the waitress. “I may look exactly like her, sound exactly like her, smell exactly like her, and be cloned from what was left of her after the Antarctican Wars, but I’m not her, got it?”
“Well, you’re kind of her,” countered Carissa. “Technically. And your name tag does say Mel B. on it.”
“Oh my God, shut up.”
“Are the other four girls also Spice Girls?” blurted Amber.
“What?”
“The other four girls of the Five Girls Cafe. Are they Spice Girls? Please say yes.”
“No,” spat the waitress, before adding, somewhat defeated, “but they are all cloned from the other four Spice Girls, so ...”
“Yes,” Carissa stated, matter-of-factly.
“I will spit in your meal.”
“Hey, hold on,” Amber demanded. “Who clones as talented and award-winning an act as the Spice Girls and puts them to work in a diner? Shouldn’t you be in Vegas or something? Imagine the money you could make singing. Or stripping!”
“Look, it’s complicated and there’s court orders involved, a lot of misunderstandings and weaponized pineapples ... It was a whole thing, OK? And I don’t want to talk about it. Now do you want to order or not? I don’t got all day.” Mel B.’s clone tapped her pen on the menu pad. “Well, OK, I do, but I don’t want to spend it out here waiting on you two, yeah?”
“We don’t have any menus,” said Carissa.
“It’s a diner, honey,” said Amber as condescendingly as she could muster. She placed her hand on the other woman’s. “They all have the same things.”
“Well, what if –”
“Your missus has a point,” said the waitress. “But, if you like, I can read off the specials to you.”
“Yes, please,” replied Carissa.
Amber’s insides rumbled like the Hemi engine of a Dodge Charger.
“Why?” she whined.
“All right,” said the waitress. “Today we have a cream of creamed corn bisque, a lemon ginger chicken platter, and a lovely braised orphan that I quite enjoy.” She then added hastily and extremely unenthusiastically: “And, as always, there’s our prize-winning BLT Times 3 – that’s nine layers of sandwich!” She punched her fist half-heartedly into the air.
“I’m sorry,” stumbled Carissa. “Did you say braised orphan?”
“Yeah. Braised is kind of like a pot roast, you see ...”
“It wasn’t the ‘braised’ part I had a question about.”
“Oh, the orphan is it?”
“Yes. The orphan.”
“OK, well, all our orphans are free-range and grass-fed. We have a lovely terrarium for them in the basement of the cafe.”
“That’s horrible!” said
Carissa, a look of disgust on her face comparable only to that of a blind man having a handful of shit waved under his nose.
“Yeah,” added Amber, “you can’t call livestock raised in a terrarium ‘free-range!’ That’s flagrant false advertising!”
“That’s ... that’s not the part I’m angry about, honey.”
“What then, the terrarium itself?” asked the waitress. “It really is quite nice, I promise, I wasn’t lying. We’ll actually sleep down there ourselves sometimes when we don’t feel like driving the three hours home.”
“You commute three hours?” asked Amber, wide-eyed.
“Well, we take shifts, yeah? And we’re the owners as well, so it doesn’t feel as bad coming in for your twelve.”
“Yeah.” Amber nodded her head. “I get that.”
“I’m sorry,” interrupted Carissa. “Are we just forgetting about the orphan thing?”
“I was. Sounded gamey.”
“Oh no, sweetheart,” said the clone of Mel B., putting her manicured hand on Amber’s shoulder. “Mel C., she can do some real things with orphan, let me tell you. She has this special blend of seasoning, yeah? That really softens up the skin and absolutely soaks it in this smoky sweet flavor ...” A chill ran through the waitress. “For Thanksgiving, she made this stuffed –”
“Are you two seriously talking about eating orphans?” Carissa blurted.
“Well, I wasn’t at first,” replied Amber, “but now ...”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah. What? She made it sound delicious.”
“Delicious?!”
“Yeah. Why would she lie? She’s the owner.”
“Well, part owner, technically,” added the not-a-Spice Girl.
“Don’t sell yourself short,” replied Amber putting her hand on the arm of the waitress. “That’s still more diners than I own.”
“Ladies,” stated Carissa flatly. “Orphans.”
“Oh, don’t be so fussy,” replied the server, waving her hand dismissively. “You can’t judge a meal before you try it.”
“I kind of feel like I can.”
“God, you’re always like this!” shouted Amber. Her insides rumbled like the boulder chasing Indiana Jones in the opening minutes of Raiders of the Lost Ark. “Why can’t you ever try new things?”
“I try new things all the time!”
“Like what?”
“I let you take the dog to the groomer last week!”
“That doesn’t count!”
“I ate that kale salad!”
“That was spinach!”
“Really? Well,” the woman began with surprising authority, before quickly petering out. “Well ... what about the time I did that thing for you,” Carissa hissed quietly while simultaneously pointing at her crotch.
“What thing?”
“That ... thing! The one you were always asking me to do! With the – God, why don’t you ever remember things?”
“Me remember? Me remember? That was two Christmases ago! We’ve been fucking the same two ways for over a year now!”
“Wait, really?” asked Carissa, deflating. “Only two?”
“Yes!” Amber looked at her wife, confused at Carissa’s genuineness. “You really haven’t noticed?”
“No, I guess not,” she said slowly. “As long as it’s you I’m face down in, I’m happy.”
“Aw, sweetie,” began Amber, placing her hands on Carissa’s. She quickly removed them. “Wait, did you mean that in the complimentary ‘the world melts away’ way or the ‘whatever, I don’t give a shit about our sex life’ way?”
“Whichever one lets us stop talking about our bedroom behaviors in front of Mel B.,” Carissa replied lovingly, placing her hands on her wife’s.
“I’m not Mel B.”
“Yes, you are,” she replied, adding, “technically.”
Amber’s insides thundered like the mighty Thor’s butthole after an all-you-can-eat Taco Bell buffet.
“Look, can I have your order or what?” demanded the waitress. “I’m genuinely concerned your missus over here is going to starve to death in this booth waiting for you to pick something.”
“Thank you,” said Amber.
“You’re welcome,” she replied before turning back toward Carissa. “Now, she’s having the braised giraffe orphan, and you –”
“Wait, giraffe?” Amber interrupted.
“Yeah, giraffe. Giraffes can be orphans.”
“Oh. Well, yeah. I just ... I thought it was a human orphan.”
The waitress sneered in disgust, her nose scrunched halfway up to her forehead.
“Human orphans?”
“Oh, thank God,” said Carissa.
“Human orphans can’t braise for shit,” continued not-Mel B. “Giraffe is by far a better braising –”
“Wait, wait, hold on,” blurted Carissa, putting up her hands. “Do you serve human orphans or not? Please be as clear as possible in your reply.”
The waitress stood straight and tall and cleared her throat.
“We do not serve human orphans.”
Carissa’s entire body relaxed at the news, like Woody Allen on horse tranquilizers.
“I’m sorry,” replied the waitress, shaking her head, “what I meant was ‘We do not serve just human orphans.’ I was trying to be so precise with my words that I went and bollocksed it all up. You know how it is, yeah? When you think so hard on something it just starts to not sound right anymore? Anyway, yeah, there’s quite a lot of panda in the recipes. Amongst other orphans.”
“Why is it always orphans?!” Carissa’s entire body tensed back up, like Sylvester the Cat on speed.
“You’re such a fucking prude.” Amber’s insides thundered like a particularly damaging summer storm. “And hurry the fuck up.”
“They can’t really be orphans, can they?” Carissa began, talking aloud but mostly to herself. “Aside from all the horrible moral implications, how would you be able to actually prove they were orphans? Right? I mean, you can’t. Can you?”
“Well, some of it is test tubes,” explained the waitress, “but a lot of it is done the old fashioned way: just kill the parents before anyone can get attached.”
“Oh my God.”
“Oh, calm down,” said Amber. “You’ve had hamburgers before, right? It’s basically the same thing.”
“Hamburgers aren’t made from human people!”
“Ours are,” said Mel B. version 2.0.
Carissa’s face matched that of a circus clown vomiting up two pounds of cotton candy and several bottles of cheap bourbon.
“Don’t eat the people orphans if they freak you out so much!” Amber shouted. “Just fucking pick something before I have them braise you.”
“Actually, she’d be a terrible braise,” began the server. “Aside from being human, once they’re over forty, you want to –”
“I’m only thirty-four!”
“You’re kidding.”
Amber’s insides growled in such a manner that they sounded distinctly and very remarkably like a cave troll bellowing: “ORDER SOMETHING NOW, FOR THE LOVE OF CHRIST!”
“OK, fine!” shouted Carissa. “I’ll have whatever’s made of cow.”
“So the chicken parmesan then?”
“Are you kid—”
“Not even a little,” said the waitress solemnly. She added: “It’s really not that good.”
“Can’t you just make the beef into a patty and throw it on the grill?”
“So, an orphan burger, yeah? But replace the ground human orphan with ground cow orphan. That’s what you want.”
“Yes.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
“OK.” The waitress put up her hands in mock defeat. Shaking her head, the waitress turned to Amber and threw out a conspiratorial elbow. “And you said she never does anything different.”
“That is pretty weird, babe,” replied Amber, raising an eyebrow at her wife.
Carissa Romero-Patel put her elbows on the table and buried her face in her hands.
***
“We ate,” said Carissa, patting her mouth daintily with the napkin, in stark contradiction to the voracity with which she had attacked her hamburger. “Can we go now?”
“I want dessert.”
“You want dessert?”
“Why can’t I want dessert?”
“BECAUSE THIS PLACE HARVESTS ORPHANS FOR FOOD.”
“Food you just ate!”
“She’s got you there,” added the waitress, having once again silently sidled up to the table.
“How do you keep doing that?” asked Amber.
“Can you answer me one question,” began Carissa. “Just ... why?”
“Why what?” echoed the faux Mel B.
“Why the orphans? Why would you start cooking with orphan meat? What was the thought process there? It can’t have come from any place but one of sheer homicidal psychosis.”
“I find that incredibly insulting,” replied the cloned Spice Girl, incredibly insulted. “But, if you must know, we started with orphans out of pure pragmatism.”
“Pragmatism? How in the seven unholy hells is –”
“We were just starting out, yeah? Our bad luck, it ended up during the Dairy Revolution, so, no cows on the menu. Course, we didn’t know that ‘til after we ordered. You know how it goes. So, anyway, the butcher up and delivered us a few crates of human orphan meat. We called the bloke and tried to return the meat but, on account of our location, yeah? He said he wouldn’t be able to return in time to keep the orphans fresh. So ... we just did what we had to do.”
“You had to eat the orphans.”
“Well, they were already dead, yeah? And we couldn’t rightly go ahead and let them spoil, could we? That’d be like kicking a cripple after they fell down.”
“But why keep ordering the orphans after that?”
“We weren’t so much ordering them, yeah? Not after we realized we could raise them here ourselves, that is.”
Carissa all but snarled. “Fine. Why start raising orphans after that? Why branch out from human orphans? Why start destroying animal families too? What is it?! What is so special about orphans specifically?!”
