scenes from an Italian restaurant

The chattering ding of a service bell jolted the Man's fixed gaze from that Thing sitting in a booth lined behind a wine shelf. The Thing was also dining alone. No other image remained within him; it had been poker-burned into the wet tissue of his eyes.

The ding was always there. It was never put to slumber.

The cadence quickened as the Man staggered closer to the source of the sound. With every step, the Italian restaurant’s velvet carpet swallowed him deeper: Shoes, then the ankles, then the caps of his knees. The floor embraced, then devoured him slowly, until it rejected the first rib, leaving only his torso, head, and arms trapped in the crimson-coded ground.

The ingrained image of the Thing served as opium, soothing the pain of mutilation. 

Ding. Ding. Ding.

Kitchen pottery crashed like thunder beyond the walls, preceded by a howling monsoon of blood-red wine that burst through the kitchen doors and swept across the restaurant. The dining room was smothered beneath its flood. Leaving the Man with dry from his collar upward.

Ding. Ding. Ding.

Somewhere within the crimson current came a pair of naked legs, treading blindly through the deluge, only to trip over the Man's exposed ribcage.

Ding. Ding. Ding.

The sacrament continued to rise slowly, oozing from the restaurant's inner shell, leaking from beneath the booths and from the mouths of overturned bottles lining the maroon shelves.

Then came the growl of a low, wet, sunken dog.

For a moment, he thought the sound had come from beneath the drunken carpet. Then it came again from his stomach, twisting through him like a desperate, cannibalistic fetus clawing its way out from beneath his ribs. He had never heard his own body wail with such demonic anguish.

It was not ordinary hunger, nor the typical ache of a missed lunch.

In fact, he had gone most of his life untouched by appetite.

Hunger is reserved for the living.

But now, at the edge of oblivion, the Third Horseman gave him company. His stomach clenched so violently that he screamed until his vocal cords bled, matching the pool of wine beneath him. Suddenly, he became beholden to every delectable smell imaginable, as was expected of an Italian restaurant: butter drowning in garlic, salted meat blistering against iron pans, fresh bread splitting open beneath steam. Tomato, olive oil, basil, wine, and smoke; all reminiscent of a slice of the old country brought to a white linen-draped candlelit table.

Ding. Ding. Ding. The bell’s Pavlovian conditioning dragged the man toward a table that served as an island in a sea of wine.

The faceless waiter emerged from the kitchen carrying a plate of steaming veal no larger than a child's heart. The Man stared at it with the desperation of a drowning rodent. He began to choke while salivating uncontrollably. His hands trembled violently as he reached for the food, but his fingers passed through the plate as though a grieving hand sifted through a loved one’s ashes.

A basket of bread began to laugh at him on a loop. The chatter became a constant ringing of hysteria, mockery, and ridicule.

The smell remained: warm sauce, herbs, garlic, bread… garlic bread, but the restaurant would not feed him. The Man desperately tried to grasp the food, but each attempt was denied. 

He hadn't ordered anything.

Ding. Ding. Ding.

Across the dining room, seated silently within a booth behind the maroon wine-bottle-lined shelves, the Thing continued dining while the Man's hunger deepened into agony.

Ding. Ding. Ding.

The waiter, whose eyes, nose, and mouth had all been sealed beneath smooth layers of flesh, watched the Man's hopeless attempts to eat. Though faceless, the waiter observed him with the clarity of a hawk’s eye.

Ding. Ding. Ding.

Mass fell from his already unimpressive frame in seconds. He became gaunt almost instantly. He screamed at the waiter, begging to be served.

The pool of wine joined the bread in laughter until the entire restaurant became an orchestra of incoherent mockery, growing louder and louder by the second.

The Man grew so hungry that his ribs seemed to shine through the near transparent curtain of his chest.

Weakly, he unfolded a napkin, nesting silverware. He took a butter knife to his left forearm and began sawing at it in one final attempt to feed himself.

Ding. Ding. Ding…

The laughter intensified…

The bread seemed to urge him onward.

Yet he could not feed himself. Nor could he produce enough pressure on the dull knife to accomplish anything meaningful aside from raising a minor scab

So the Man closed his eyes and used his teeth… His jaws tore into his own flesh.

The hunger ceased.

The laughter stopped.

Thus began the boiling of the sacrosanct liquid pooled around him. Glowing clots surfaced from the wine and stitched themselves back into the Man's severed body. Tendons threaded. The naked legs fused into his torso. Vertebrae flowered upward. Flesh sealed itself with the sound of wet fabric being sewn shut.

Wine and water poured from his lungs, washing everything away. His green, permanent eyes lost their fixed gaze at last, freed from the spell of the Thing.

The dining room grew louder, and silverware rattled.

Plates screamed against tabletops.

Across the still vacant restaurant, the Thing relapsed into a natural state of seclusion, returning to its meal as though all creation had briefly convulsed around an appetite it no longer remembered possessing.

Ding. Ding. Ding.

The Man rose.

Before him stood a waiter, his face beneath the yellow glow of the hanging lamps, a welcoming clerical smile stitched unnaturally across it.

Above them all, the dining bell convulsed.

Ding! Ding! Ding!

It spasmed faster than the speed of light.

The Man looked upward and declared.

"I have outgrown this place."

He walked across the hollow restaurant to the front desk and pressed the bell.

Then came complete silence.

The glass entrance doors, once blackened and devoid of light, stood clear.

Beyond them waited an empty strip-mall parking lot beneath the humming twilight of when the Sun and Moon greet each other.

A smoking, totaled SUV rested crooked across several parking spaces… Glass glittered across the asphalt like crushed ice… All beneath a heap of burnt metal and blood-soaked shrapnel lay the Man.