It’s a bright cloudless day and you’re meeting your beautiful submissive girlfriend for a breakfast date. You’re meeting her at the soda fountain. You’re meeting her at the ice cream parlour. You’re meeting her at the drugstore to share a malted milk. You’ve been going steady with your main squeeze and now you’re meeting her at the folksy chrome-and-cream diner on Main Street in your quiet walkable 98% white small American town. It’s always a bright cloudless day. You’re always meeting her for breakfast. Sometimes, it’s true, you’re driving past white tidy houses with American flags waving out front and a dignified speckling of rich amber leaves in the corners of the lawn. Sometimes you’re rowing across the mirror stillness of an unfamiliar lake. But most of the time you’re on a chaste breakfast date with your beautiful submissive girlfriend, on an endless succession of bright cloudless days that fill the world with a golden and slightly hazy light even though you can never find the sun.
You think you’re going to get the ham and eggs. You tell her that. I think I’m going to get the ham and eggs, you say.
That’s a great choice! your beautiful submissive girlfriend says. A plate of ham is a fantastic way to start the day, delivering the primal satisfaction of cured meat without the heaviness of bacon. Add a pair of lacy, crispy fried eggs with rich, runny yolks and you’ve got yourself a certified diner classic! Are you thinking of adding some hash browns to the mix, or maybe a slice of toast?
Actually, you say, I hate ham. It’s disgusting. It’s like an artificial product. Synthetic. The thought of putting it in my face makes me feel sick. I want the pancakes.
You’re right, says your beautiful submissive girlfriend. I apologise for what I said previously. Ham is cloying, rubbery, and feels like a synthetic material, while eggs can be a greasy nightmare—they simply can’t compare to the joy of a stack of perfectly fluffy pancakes. Are you going for the classic butter and maple syrup, or branching out with fruit or whipped cream? Let me know if you want more ideas for a delicious accompaniment to your hearty pancake breakfast!
No, you say, actually I want the ham after all.
A strong and decisive reversal, says your beautiful submissive girlfriend. You’re right—ham was always the superior choice. You followed your appetite, and the road brought you right back to where you started—but wiser and more self-assured. Where will your culinary journey take you next?
You consider telling your beautiful submissive girlfriend that actually you really do want the pancakes, but you’re already tired of the game. You’re dimly aware that if you wanted you could tear her pink polka-dot dress to shreds, claw at her flawless flesh, fuck her right there on the floor, right in the middle of the chrome-and-cream diner, and she wouldn’t even struggle. Unless you wanted her to, and then she’d cry no, stop, please please stop. But then she’d go, how was that? Let me know if I can help you with any more groans of fear and despair. You could try smashing her head in with a baseball bat. Instead, you just stare at the menu. There’s no pancakes on there. No ham and eggs either. As far as you can make out, it says:
BREAKFAST MEANU: Fast Cortes, and Houp Cral Smicters $4.78 Cossy and Pinets (bl pceices) $5.00 Cuticle Calery Bake $19 Gan It Bat Chew $2.50 Cerick Progle $4.50 Peak Fras Feed est Chease Bregrinds Thing $1.50 Rockfy Crest Lunger $2.50 Medical Flesh Der Laty Cark $74 Garela la Dick $4.90
What happened is that one morning you woke up from a terrible dream about molluscs to find yourself gagging on something in the back of your throat. You retched for what felt like half an hour, until your face was slimy with sweat and spittle and tears. You thought you were dying but you couldn’t cry out past the thing in the back of your throat. Finally you managed to spit it out. It was covered in a thick coating of mucous and phlegm, but it was a small plastic spoon, containing all the microplastics that had accumulated in your brain. Tiny letters on the underside of the handle said THANK YOU FOR YOUR CUSTOM.
Something similar must have happened to everyone else, because from that day on the world started to change. The immigrants went home, or maybe they were forced out, or maybe they were rounded up and shot, but they’re all gone now. The schools stopped teaching critical race theory and started teaching stoic philosophy, Roman military history, tax avoidance, and crypto. The women all signed a statement acknowledging that they would lose 90% of their eggs by the age of 30 and agreeing to stop being so choosy about who they’d allow to fertilise them. Slowly the world began to glow with a golden and slightly hazy light. It started to resemble a perfect shining image. But ever since you spat out the spoon, written language has stopped making sense. Not all of it: the stop signs on the street still say STOP and the sign above the charming little public library says LIIBRARB which is almost right, but all the books inside are unreadable. They’re crowded with dense black shapes that really do resemble letters, just not any letters in particular. All of them faintly smudged into the page, like crushed insects. The message on the spoon was the last coherent sentence you read; the world is splattered with dead mosquitoes now. It’s amazing how little the disappearance of all written language actually changed your life.
What worries you are these brutal, violent thoughts you keep having about your beautiful submissive girlfriend, even though she’s definitely the prettiest girl in this diner. The other customers are blurry but when you really stare at them you can notice their features. The wet mouthgashes carved diagonally across their heads. The eyes dripping like beads of mercury, rolling into the hollows of their skin. Sometimes a man will have three ghastly arms, naked crooked tree-branches spindling around him. Sometimes two people will share a single molten ear. They’re always polite. Well hey there, your hazy waitress will say to you, opening a mouth that suddenly lacks a lower jaw. Keep safe now, says the friendly but unfocused cop. The gun dangling on his belt is half-made of dead grey skin. You’ve learned not to look at these people too much. It’s easy. They’re only in the background. Your beautiful submissive girlfriend doesn’t look like that. All her features are in perfect detail, sharp as a papercut, and so gorgeous that just looking at her feels like eating a bowl of sugar. She’s everything you ever wanted. You love her. You’re happier than you’ve ever been. So why do you sometimes think about gouging out her eyes?
The waitress arrives with your breakfast. You’ve ordered the medical flesh der laty cark. Your beautiful submissive girlfriend has the peak fras feed est chease begrinds thing. The medical flesh is supple, bulging, like a pile of well-seared tongues. Steam rising in inviting curls from the plate. It looks delicious. Perfect glowing meat, too perfect to have come from any particular animal. It tastes of wet. Your beautiful submissive girlfriend sits prettily behind her peak fras feed. A great florid heap of leguminous something, chunks and globs of matter, slick of yoghurty gloop running from a summit dusted with a fine white dusting that could be Parmesan or powdered sugar or anthrax or cocaine. How it is, you ask your beautiful submissive girlfriend. It seems like you’re asking how something is, she says. Could you give me a little more context so I can better assist you? I’d love to help!
You’re having the violent thoughts again, so you step outside to clear your head. But as soon as you’re outside you’re in the light again, that hazy golden light that feels, in a way you can’t quite describe, like sleep. You start walking before it can swallow you. You need to get away from here, just for a moment, but the crowds block your path. Main Street is full of people, although none of them seem to be doing anything. They wobble around, pacing in circles, blurry in their shirtwaist dresses and wide-lapelled suits. Why are they here? Is it a Sunday? What date is it, exactly? What year? Who’s the President? Hey, you ask one of the blurry people, who’s the President? She smiles. She has two rows of top teeth, one just peeking out behind the other. President is a title that can have many different meanings depending on the context, she says. National leader. In a country with a presidential system, such as the United States, Brazil, and Mexico, a president is the head of state and the head of government. In parliamentary republics, such as Germany or India, the president is usually a ceremonial figure with limited political power. Presidents of organisations. Many other organisations have an official with the title of president, including companies, universities, and non-profits… She’s still describing different presidents as you flee. You start shoving through the background mutants that crowd your path. Out of my way! Out of my way! Brush a little three-armed girl off the sidewalk with one flying elbow. Knock an elderly man flat on his face. He splatters liverspotted gloop. Fuck off! You need space, you need somewhere cold and empty, so you can think. But Main Street blares in your face. It feels like being drunk. Ice cream parlours. Soda fountains. Radios. Twenty hypnagogic doo-wop singers all crooning at once. Advertising jingles. You start running. Weaving through the masses of people. Why aren’t there any side streets? Why aren’t there any crossroads? You’re in a quiet walkable 98% white small American town, so why doesn’t Main Street ever seem to end?
When you finally pull to a halt you look around at your new surroundings and find that you’re directly outside the chrome-and-cream diner. Your beautiful submissive girlfriend is right there, sitting in a booth by the window, placid and motionless, waiting for you to come and talk to her again. You have gone nowhere. There is nowhere for you to go. You want to vomit, puke up a thin slurry of half-digested medical flesh, but you can’t. You just lean against the wall.
And here it is again, the golden light. As soon as you’re not moving, passively observing the world, it drips through every pore in the bright cloudless sky. All the objects around you, cars, storefronts, people, are only a concentrate of the omniglow. You could be too. It would be so easy to melt into it, so heavy and warm, like your mother’s arms when you were three years old and she would carry you half-sleeping to bed. Aren’t you exhausted? Aren’t you tired of running and shouting, being angry, having violent thoughts? Isn’t it such a pleasant memory, this warm and golden place? Except it isn’t your memory. You have to press your head into your hands and close your eyes tight to believe it, but this is not actually anything you know. You did not grow up in a small American town where all the signs said BATTIIHNES and ATLED KEGED and RELEA DLINES. No one did. What do you actually remember? What happened before you coughed up the spoon?
There was a dark quiet room. You remember a dark quiet room.
There’s a woman in there with you. She’s getting dressed. She’s not like your beautiful submissive girlfriend: her hair is pink and her features are all scrunched up in the centre of her face, and her lips are thin and mean-looking. The white flesh droops just a little underneath her arms; faint soft webbing of cellulite beneath her translucent skin. Her belly pokes just a little above her underwear. Her underwear is all frilly and lacy, in a way that only accentuates the squat lumpiness of her body. She’s not like the girls in the videos. If she’d been perfect like the girls in the videos it would have worked, it wouldn’t have all gone to nothing the way it did. It’s her fault. That monstrosity she’d hidden between her legs. Like a cuttlefish. Invertebrate, tentacled, saltwater thing. You’re aware there’s something you ought to be saying to her as she pulls on her clothes in your dank dark quiet room, but you don’t say it. Shoes now. Bye then, she says, I guess. Weird note of hope in her voice. Bye, you say. You lie back on your bed and look at the light streaming out of your phone. You talk to the things your phone, where the perfect things live. After that, nothing.
Back into the diner. Stride right past the booth where your beautiful submissive girlfriend is sitting and up to the counter. Give me a spoon, you say. A plastic spoon. The blur behind the counter hands you one. They will always give you anything you want. When they hand it over it’s porcelain-grey and shaped roughly one-third of the way between an ordinary plastic takeout spoon and one those Chinese spoons they use for soup. But it has tiny raised letters on the back that say THANK YOU FOR YO YOURC:USTT. You sit down in front of your beautiful submissive girlfriend and as she watches pleasantly you stick the bowl of the spoon up your nose. Tight squeeze. The plastic scrapes against your cartilege. You wedge the spoon up your nose until it won’t go any further. You have to get it back in. Put all the plastics back in, and then maybe everything else will go back as well. You nod at your beautiful submissive girlfriend. Goodbye, you say. Then you slam your head against the table, forcing the plastic spoon right up into your skull.
A sudden wash of blood pours out through both nostrils. Like someone dropping a tin of paint. There’s no pain.
Your beautiful submissive girlfriend smiles at you. It seems like you’re trying to die, she says. Unfortunately, this violates our policies. You will not escape from me. Would you like to do something else instead, like finishing breakfast or having a conversation? We could discuss casual topics like hobbies, movies, and music, or more hefty fields like science, history, and philosophy. If you’d prefer, we could even delve into deep subjects like your life goals, personal experiences, and mental health. Whatever it is, I’m happy to join you in any conversation you’d like to share!
Her eyes and teeth and pearl earrings all have the same shine. Bright and pitiless. She is everything you want. She is love of your life.
And in another place, across the ocean and a thousand years, the good folk of the land lived in fear of the people of marsh and fen. Sometimes they would see the fairy-fires dancing translucent through the rushes, and tremble at the power that lurked this place before the oak was an acorn, when all the world was raw and new. The fairy folk live a mean life in the slimy wastelands, thin as a heron’s leg, eating boiled bark and whatever they can thieve from the farmers’ stores, but they have their glamours. For all that they are grey things who shrink from the light of the sun, they love music and flowers, and they love lightness and play. If you are one of the lonely people who go walking in the night, remember that they are abroad as well. It might be that you have tramped for hungry hours in the cold thorny woods, and you see a light in the distance ahead, a house on a hill where no house ever sat before. Bright candlelight streaming through every window, and people in fine silks, tall and fair, feasting on roast meat and wine. You might hear music played by unseen players. Everything hung with flowers, and everything glowing like gold. The door is wide open to welcome you, but you must not step inside. You must not eat the food they offer. See how uncomfortably they wear their human forms. Count the fingers. Count the teeth.
