Your mom knew better than to embarrass you at work. That’s why she didn’t say hi. Her smile was enough. Though it couldn’t keep you from blushing and stammering. She ordered a double burger combo with onion rings and a coke. You tried to not look down at her as you took her cash, not wanting to make yourself cognizant of what your co-worker in the kitchen was hooting and hollering at. The air spilled in fresh through the window, contrasting the still and unreal fog you felt inside. The natural air in combat with the air conditioning from within.
When you handed her back her change, you saw it inadvertently. Her milky white cleavage, which you knew was being viewed on screen by Dan back there. You could hear his husky voice, audible to you, but breaking up when touched by the fresh outer air, before even having a chance at making it to the amplification chamber within your mom’s car. You used to sit in the backseat of that car as she ordered food not too many years ago.
You could imagine him back there in the kitchen, snug in his sandals (only because your supervisor wasn’t in), mock-fucking the side of the grill as he fried your mom’s double burger. “What do we put in this food to give our customer’s tits like that?” he asked himself audibly. “Jesus Christ.”
Cars started to line up behind your mom’s, at least three visible to you, but you could tell by the orders in your ear that there were two more around the corner. Fucking Dan, you thought. Hurry up.
He was always like this. Slow. Not just at his job. But at life. He was a forty-three year old man that still worked at a fast-food joint. He did so without shame or the urge for anything better. As the cars started to stack up behind your mom’s, she started to look in her rearview with concern. “Is my order holding up the line, swee-, umm, sir?”
“No, no,” you said. “Not any more than anyone else’s.” You looked up at the order display, feeling the weight of it on your throat and shoulders. You never knew that letters and numbers could weigh anything until you started working with Dan. Especially when it was just you and him together. Or maybe it was just that you felt each passing second when it was just Dan alone back there. With all the talking he did when the kitchen was full of uninterested, and later irritated, ears, things might have taken even longer then.
Your spelunking into the endless pit of confusion about Dan and just how he could be who he was, was interrupted by a blaring horn. Your mom looked in her rearview nervously at the red Corvette behind her. “I can go park somewhere,” she said.
“Just a minute,” you said, and then you leaned away from the window as you looked toward the kitchen. “Dan!?”
There was no answer coming back to you. You could make out the ice cream machine from where you stood, but nothing more. Though the red Corvette answered instead, twice, and one of the cars behind it twice more.
You looked over at your mom. Her reaction to your face made you aware just how confused you must have looked in that moment. “Just a minute,” you said. You walked toward the kitchen, just out of sight of your mother, and when you turned the corner, you saw Dan standing there, facing the wall opposite you.
He had both hands before him, making his arms invisible to you. He appeared to be shaking. The visual itself was disturbing enough, never mind the incongruity of whatever it was he was doing. It stopped you in your tracks for a second. You could hear his heavy and short breaths, each one stumbling over the last, except for every third one, which ended in a breathy exhalation that sounded something like “uuhhye,” barely perceptible over the sound of the freezer humming.
“Dan?” you asked.
As soon as you said it, he froze. He placed a double burger, the exact kind your mom had ordered, onto the shelf in its cardboard container with his right hand. It sat there open, both the box and burger itself. Then he pulled back his hand down in front of him and you heard a slow but deliberate *zipping* noise. He cleared his throat and shook his shoulders, as if expelling himself of some chill or other. Then he reached out again with both hands and reassembled the burger. He closed it in its cardboard and popped the overlapping nubs into place so it would remain closed. He turned around, the front of his shirt untucked, and he handed you the burger. When you looked up at his weathered face, it was as red as you had ever seen it. It only occurred to you later that night that this was the first time you have ever seen him look ashamed of something.
When you grabbed the burger, you said, without even thinking about it: “But where’s the rest of the order?” Your voice dry and flat.
“Oh!” he said, and then turned around and started scrambling for the rest of it. You popped open the box as he did, and you lifted the bun, and looked down at the patty. On top of it was only lettuce. Nothing more. Not even mayonnaise. The burger was clean of any foreign element. You closed it back up before he turned around, and he handed you the bag, to which you placed the burger inside.
There was more honking outside. “What about the coke?” you asked him. “Oh, yeah. The coke,” he said. And he turned around and grabbed a cup. As he did you went back to the window and handed your mom her order.
“Thank you,” she said. To which you didn’t reply.
She stared up at you, not sure what the look on your face meant. Then you felt someone come up from behind you. It was Dan, he handed you the drink. You turned around and leaned out the window and handed it to your mom. “Thanks,” she said.
“You’re welcome,” you said. “Have a nice day.”
She smiled up at you for a moment. Then she put the car into drive and left, her ivory face and pearly cleavage being replaced by the red face of an angry man, whose color scheme was only interrupted by the black of his shades and facial hair.
You turned around to see Dan had already scurried back to the kitchen.
From then on, the line moved a lot quicker. Not just quicker than it had with your mom. Quicker than it ever had before with Dan in the kitchen.
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As you stepped outside into the night air to throw out trash, you thought about Dan’s penis being stroked by his hands over the top of a hot double burger. Just the thought that it had been back there, every shift with him, out and free and being jerked off for at least one order a shift. You could remember the pretty faces, doubleframed by the window of the building and the window of their car, looking up at you, and you could remember the long waits (longer than with most customers), but it wasn’t until now that you connected those dots. It felt like lego pieces snapping into place. Like the nubs on a burger container popping when they were pressed over one another.
And you thought about Dan’s face as he squeezed mayonnaise onto those very burgers, hiding his pride and shame from all eyes and tastebuds, as the face of his victim filled the little screen that hung over the freezer, as if she (and you somehow knew it was always a she) was watching it herself. Sometimes even mothers, whose children ate from kids’ meals, would sit in that car giggling with their moms, as the mom bit into a burger filled with his special sauce. And superimposed over that image, you saw his cock being pulled defiantly, like two film reals running through the same projector simultaneously. The mom’s face chewing and smiling and that cock being tugged and it humping into and towards the hand that tugged it. The rhythm in her bites, as reflected in her cheeks, in keeping with the pace of Dan’s strokes, which he made while looking down at the unguarded beef, his teeth clenched with determination, eager to paint it with the contents of his balls. Eager to make his arousal manifest on that patty, and then wrapped up and packaged in that burger, and handed off to that soft hand.
Two objects with nothing in common, and with no reason to intersect in life, but now they were forced to meet through his cunning. The woman’s mouth (tongue, cheeks, and all) being filled with the manifestation of his lust for her, all gooey and white, which had made his balls feel electrically charged as he massaged his cock not minutes before. And then it all just being released, releasing him from his burden, and making it his little secret, further hidden by mayonnaise and a bun, before being served to her smiling face, which would fill itself with it willingly like communion, as he smiled back it that little heated pocket of space that otherwise meant so little to her life. Going back home to kiss her husband, who was a senior analyst at some company or other. Or maybe not touching it until she got home, and instead eating it across from her husband at the dining room table, the contents of his balls carried across the city in that little Trojan Horse of a bag, and then into that stomach through that little Trojan Horse of a burger. A huge victory for a man of such modest means.
All of this flashed in your mind, within only a second, as if your brain were trying to get you to enjoy his little hobby as much as he does. And then a constant along with those thoughts. Those images. Her chewing. Him jerking. And then her smile: “Mmm, this tastes good.”
Suddenly, the back door rocketed open, letting the orange light spill into the backlane. He looked down at you. The shame still apparent in him as if it altered the structure of his face. “Promise me,” he said, his eyes wet with desperation. “Promise me you won’t tell Tom.”
The cock that you saw in your mind, presumably his cock, went soft within seconds. Unlike when erect, it looked wrinkled and timid, as if eager for a pair of underwear to hide in, clinging to his blushing balls for protection. You looked up at the man, his little world, the one he had been pleased with beyond what any person could be, coming to an end, possibly, within his own mind, which was now a kitchen unto itself, one busier and hotter than any he could staff himself.
“Promise me,” he said again, looking like he was about to burst into tears, as if he was making up for in tears what he failed to deliver in cum earlier today.
“Yeah, man,” you said, sheepishly. “It’s all good.” You thanked god in that moment that he didn’t know the woman whose burger he was planning to enhance was your mom. If he did, you wouldn’t be able to just play this off. You would have been dragged into a conflict that you had no guts to fight because of some unwritten dictum that you were born into. You hoped he’d never find out.
His face at hearing your agreeableness, though he had no reason to believe it, became more still. He continued as if necessary to explain: “They can never tell,” he says, and looks off into the night, as if daydreaming. “Not when you put the mayonnaise over top of it all. It doesn’t hurt nobody. It’s just a fun thing to do to pass the time. You have to let a nut off somewhere, right? Why not there? It’s not like they’ll ever find out, right. Not unless someone went and told them. And nobody knew to tell.” His dreaminess left him. He looked down. “Not until now, I guess.
He looked over at you, as if expecting an agreement in the form of a word or nod. But when you said nothing, he continued: “Just knowing that they’re eating it.” He shook his head with a smile the way others do at pride over a promotion. “Especially if they look good. It’s a fun gag. That’s it. I didn’t even get to do it this time. Usually I can rocket one out quick. But I think I just got greedy with those tits staring down at me and I wanted to enjoy the moment a little longer. It was stupid, I admit. If just would have finished when I should have, I could go home tonight and jerk off again knowing that she ate that burger with my cum all in it.”
Your face went red, but it was invisible to him in the dark.
“And then you walked in and scared the living Jesus out of me. Jokes on me, I guess. If I only let it go a few seconds earlier, it would have been a good sendoff. Like a good way to retire the whole thing.”
He looked down at you, maybe expecting you to ask what he meant. You said nothing.
He continued: “Because I think I’m done doing this stuff man. I’m not just saying that because you caught me.” You believe the first part, but you knew the second to be false. “It’s going to be tough. And I still don’t think it’s the biggest deal in the world, but I do get that maybe it’s a bad idea. And maybe I shouldn’t be wasting time doing it.” A sadness suddenly came to his eyes, as if what he was saying had just started to set in. You wondered just then if this was the thing that kept him working here, or at the least, the thing that kept him enjoying it. That vibrating tension in his balls as they were about to evacuate themselves, and then the visual of his cock dripping goo all over that patty, all in momentary gushes, like paint dripping out of an overturned bucket. Looking up at the screen to the face that burger belonged to. To the gorgeous face that had seen and not seen what she drew from him, seen and not seen her own fate. The substance that would gush, slosh, and squish against the roof of her mouth and around her teeth. All the while, his open toes tapping in sandal soles that stood on that dirty floor, feeling light from orgasm and proud.
Wherever the ledge was between crying and not crying, he managed to grab at it and hold himself from falling. He looked down at you. “Anyway man. Deal?”
It amazed you that he was literally twice your age and still talked to you as if you were equals. “Yeah, Dan,” you said. “Just don’t do it again.”
“I won’t,” he insisted, waving his arms. “I’m done. Done. I promise.”
“Okay,” you said.
“Seriously. Done. Never once more. Ever. I’m finishing today.”
You nodded your head. It took a few more volleys of this before he finally was convinced that he had convinced you. And then he said “thank you” with an uncharacteristic amount of shyness and disappeared back in the building, leaving you alone in the darkness, unsure of what to do next. He was back in the kitchen, alone with himself, where he never should have been allowed to be to begin with. That kitchen, his cock’s kingdom. You all just worked in it. What would come next? Only one thing was certain, Dan’s secret was safe with you. You weren’t even sure who to tell if you wanted to.
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You were lying on your bed with your hands behind your head staring at the ceiling. The sunlight spilled in through your room window, letting your bed shine in its glow. You cherished moments like this. Between school and work, you hadn’t had much freetime to yourself. You usually spent it alone, reading or thinking. Today was no different.
Outside, your brother and mom were talking in the kitchen. Your brother was animated, driven by his fascination with the who’s and why’s, where’s and how’s, the when’s and how to bring them closer. A young man hating to waste even a second of his life without knowing how it contributed to each future second. The goings-on of who did what, and who said what to who, at his lawschool, not so much as spilling from his mouth, as being thrown from it, into the conscientious air of that kitchen. Your mom listened, her sunglasses up on her blonde hair, nodding her head, mechanical with its regularity, but human with its degree of interest. It was as if she was using her skills as an accountant to convert what your brother was saying into numbers, adding and subtracting where need be, and then coming back at him with the answers to his complex equations. “Did you tell her that?” she asked.
“That’s the thing,” he said. “I did. But should I have to? She’s in a higher percentile than I am and it’s only now that I’m wondering how that happened.”
As your kitchen buzzed like a beehive, all on the strength of two bees alone, you thought about your mom’s face, both dignified and soft. Approachable but immediately evoking of respect. And almost as immediately, you could see that pale cock, you hadn’t even seen what it looked like but you saw it now anyways, it’s size, shape, and color. And you wondered, even if he hadn’t done the deed, which you knew firsthand that he hadn’t, did he touch that burger at all with his erect cock or maybe his balls.
You imagined him, cocooned within that kitchen, as if he were a turtle and it his shell, a line of cars wrapped around the building, as if trying but failing to squeeze the life out of it. Cars passing on the road outside at 55 miles per hour, all with people within them, oblivious to his presence, who had somewhere to be. Somewhere where something would happen, but only if they were there. An ongoing infinite node of bleeps and bloops, a living circuit board of metal and flesh, being propelled by the speed of automobiles and footsteps. Activating situations as they moved and interacted, a cohesive whole as if designed by a single man, just mundane and repetitive enough to make it clear that it wasn’t. Any single man would have better taste than what was, and those that wouldn’t would have sucked the joy from it completely, and replaced it entirely with metallic efficiency, removing flesh from the equation fullstop, or making man (and woman) dry as bone, without discernible parts, and with only one facial expression and shape.
The world turned, all while he stood back there, a blackhole of time and effort, yanking on himself, looking up at the brunette mother of three, and interior designer, on that screen, oblivious as to what was happening to her burger behind the wall she had just passed with her flip-flop clad foot, releasing from, then remeeting with, the brake pedal of her car. His balls sitting on the patty, ready to empty themselves all over it, so she could eat it with her two sons and one daughter in the car, smiling at them as she did.
The image of him resting his balls on that burger was so vivid that you couldn’t help but wonder if he did so or not. You thought about your mom biting into that burger and you imagine Dan’s face and body as he danced upon it with those sure-to-be big balls. And did his cock touch it? Maybe that’s how he did it. He wrapped the bottom half of the burger, patty and all, around the bottom of his shaft in a semi-circle and he fucked it, only to pull it back to his penis head when the time was right, so he could empty his animating fuel all over it. Maybe he had fucked your mom’s burger, and just had never finished. His thrusts vulgar and intense as you waited there, and your mom sat, restrained by her seatbelt, outside. Sitting there in her own little world, waiting for her gift from his. And for you to hand it to her, an intermediary between worlds. You reach for you belt as your mom and brother continue their conversation in the kitchen, you let down your pants, and your erect penis clears your underwear and you begin to stroke it.
You could hear cars outside, a running lawnmower and a plane carrying passengers through the sky all around you. You began to whisper to yourself, so quietly that you yourself could barely hear it over the world speaking its language around you to nobody in particular. “Oh, yeah. Yeah, that’s good,” you whispered. You start to wonder as you stroke. If you had caught Dan a few seconds later, after his deed were done, maybe in the very act of climax, witnessing droplets of cum dripping onto that burger like hot glue, as he looked over at you, unable to stop, just staring at you as it dripped and coated its landed slab of meat, would you have accepted it from him, put it in the bag, go back out there, and hand it to your smiling mom, her welcome mouth below her black shades, and her ivory cleavage below her welcome mouth? The only bit to escape its fate, as she bit into that landmine, the droplet to drip with mayonnaise and land between those two giant breasts, having to go to the washroom to remove her shirt and bra and wipe it down, freeing the titties that inspired that droplet to begin with. Titties hiding in a shell of their own, the world spinning around that bathroom like it was the sun, and the world outside a rotating solar system of droplets, just falling in perpetuity, in hopes of reaching the eternal rest within your mom’s mouth, sleeping in its hammock forever.
“Who would it hurt,” you whispered to yourself. “It’s just a fun gag. A very, very, very fun gag.” You massaged your balls with three fingers on your left hand. “If only he didn’t take so long, she would have ate him. She would have swallowed a man’s cum. Dan’s cum.” Dan and his stupid jokes. Dan, who rides a bicycle at 43 because he can’t afford a car, or because he never got his license. Dan whose uniform would forever be that red and orange apron. And as you imagined your mom biting into that burger, you also imagined, with equal strength and vision, Dan’s cock dripping cum onto that burger as his eyes twitched, over the soundtrack of your mom in your kitchen now, talking with your brother. And as you imagined Dan cumming, saying “yeeaahhh” in his lazy drawl as you did, your cock began to cum along with it onto your own stomach. And as it let loose its sweet honey, in a moment that felt like time itself had stopped, the honeycomb of your city block buzzed on all around you. It would never stop buzzing.
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“If he’s late one more time, they’re going to fire him.”
You didn’t even have to ask who they were talking about. Though you listened as you handed a man his change.
“I can’t even believe the guy is a real person,” said one of the cooks. “The guy should have at least been a manager by now. Do you think they ever offered it to him?”
“Manager? No. Definitely not. Even if he wasn’t the laziest sack of shit who ever worked here, there’s no way they’d let a junkie be manager.”
“A junkie? Dan?”
“Yeah.”
“Why do you think?”
“Emily said she saw him.”
“Saw him where?”
“Her neighbor deals. She says she saw him go there last Saturday.”
“He was probably buying weed.”
“No, the guy only sells hard stuff.”
“You think it’s coke?”
“No, too expensive. He doesn’t have that kind of money. We know what he makes.”
“Meth?”
There was a silence as if he had stopped to think about it. “No, then he’d work a lot faster than he does.”
“Opiates then?”
There was laughter. “If he did heroin, he’d probably be able to shut the fuck up for a few seconds.”
“Okay then, shrooms? Maybe acid?”
“No, I’d expect some self-improvement then. Plus the guy doesn’t sell it, Emily says. I tried.”
“Then he’s doing blue.”
“No, again, that would keep his mouth shut.” There was a silence again. “Unless… he’s using it to… you know.”
“Uggh. Sick. I wouldn’t put it past that guy though.”
“No,” said the other one, as if something had just occurred to him. “He’s too lazy for even that.”
The other one laughed.
“If he came home and saw a girl passed out on his bed. He’d give her a few pumps and get tired and then just start talking to her.”
More laughter. “Do you think he’s a virgin?”
As they talked further, Dan cut in front of the car behind the window and said hi to you as he opened up the employee door, workclothes in hand. Their conversation about him cut itself short then.
“Took you long enough, Dan.”
“Fuck you, guys,” he said, as he scrambled to get his work gear on. “The bus was late.”
“Why not take an earlier one,” asked the other, as if it were an earnest question.
“Fuck that!” said Dan, and he laughed as if the other two were laughing along with him. “I wouldn’t come early if they paid me time and a half for it.
The sun slowly sank in the sky. It was going to be another one-on-one shift with Dan. After 40 minutes, one of your coworkers left. And then after another hour, the other left too. Just leaving you and Dan to hold down the fort.
After a while, things got slow. “Hey,” he called from the kitchen.
“Yeah, Dan,” you asked.
“You ever boned a sleeping chick?”
Your face went red. Not only was the question way more intense than Dan realized, but it was the first time he had ever asked you a sex question directly. You realized then that he was the only person working there who hadn’t realized you were a virgin. “N-no, why?” you asked.
“Oh nothing,” he said, as if the conversation were casual, maybe in his mind it was. “I was just thinking about it a lot lately. Like, what if you were at a party, and you opened a door, and you saw a girl passed out there. What would you do?”
You had thought about this scenario a lot. You knew exactly what you’d do, or exactly what you’d like to do, but you weren’t about to say it out loud. Least of all to Dan. “I don’t know,” you said.
“Yeah,” he said. “Me, I think I’d go for it. Why not? I mean, who will it hurt? It would just be harmless fun.”
“Yeah,” you said. “It would.” That was a strange thing to say, but it turned you on to say it. Even just listening to Dan saying these things was exciting to you. You imagined him walking into a bedroom in the middle of a house-party. Lying there is something pretty, young and naïve – and passed completely out. Eyes clamped shut, and mouth hanging open. That trademarked smile on his face as he closes the bedroom door behind himself, muffling the music outside, some new song quite unlike his AC-DC and Motley Crue. Someone half his age lying there, and good at school. Someone who was going to be somebody some day. His sandalled feet move across the carpet until he’s standing at the edge of the bed, looming over her defenseless flesh, sweet as a burger patty. His pants fall.
“You ever hear of that blue velvet stuff?” he asked.
“Yeah,” you said. “I think so.” Now I know, you thought. He wouldn’t have told them. He told me.
“Pretty cool, hey?”
You didn’t answer.
“Just slip it in a girl’s drink like magic and have your fun.”
You wondered if he was jerking off back there. Somehow you knew that he wasn’t. The thought of being with him in that kitchen, the two of you jerking off together, your bodies a contrast in age and lifestyle. But your cum looking the same, globby white, when it came out, as if both drawn from the same well.
“Looks like we have another customer,” he said, looking up at the black sedan pulling round on his screen. “It’s been slow today.”
You wanted to say: “If she’s pretty. You should leave a present in her burger. I won’t say anything.” But you couldn’t bring yourself to do it. It wouldn’t have made a difference anyway. The driver of the sedan was a man.
-------------------------------------------------------
As the day went on, Dan started to become uncharacteristically silent. He was still slower than anyone else who worked the kitchen, but business today was slower than that, so it wasn’t an issue.
After a while, the silence was suddenly broken with “can I tell you something?” He sounded both grave and excited to talk. Like something had been building inside him. Something that he hadn’t said, hanging on to it for dear life, maybe a first in his lifetime, something which he needed to get out before your shifts ended. For the first time in his life, he was aware of the clock.
“Uhhh,” you said. “Sure.”
“Okay,” he said. Almost as if he wasn’t expecting you to say yes. Again, a thing quite unlike him to be concerned about. “There’s a thing I’ve dreamed about doing for years now, but I haven’t done it yet.”
“Yeah,” you said with a dry mouth. You had never heard this much determination, or stifled drive in his voice before.
“Something I’ve been thinking about since you caught me that one time.”
“Okay.”
“Something very cool. Something that I’m excited about. Something that I’ve never done before. I wanted to. I just never did.” There was a silence for a bit. “So anyways, I went to see this guy about it and…” again there was more silence. And then he screamed “Tits!”
You stood there baffled. It wasn’t until you heard the voice in your earpiece that you knew what he meant. “Hello, can I get three double burger meals with extra mayonnaise, some….”
Your mind went blank. Even still, somehow, without really hearing it, you entered in the order exactly as she described it.
And then the car pulled around the corner, up to your window, and your mom sat there, both her face and the tops of her breasts, smiling up at you. Pretending as if she didn’t know you. “How much will it be,” she mumbled to you.
“Umm,” you said, and you repeated the total to her. As she handed you the money, you heard Dan say from the back “hey man, do you mind if I leave a few minutes early. Joey is going to be here any second now.” There was an urgency in his voice which seemed to be motivated by something much deeper in him than his usual urge to not be working. He didn’t just want to be outside, he wanted to be somewhere out there in particular. Somewhere that needed him to be there, on time and ready to perform.
After a few more moments of you standing there by the window, looking at your screen to keep from looking down at your mom, you heard Dan ask again. He was taking longer than usual with the order again. You knew you shouldn’t, after all there was no rush this time, but you couldn’t help yourself, and you walked away from the window and slowly peaked your head around the corner, doing so now as silently as you could.
And when you did, you saw the burger sitting in its cardboard, looking unviolated. And you looked over to see Dan standing over three open drinks, stirring each one with a straw, looking inside them with absolute concern, as if the weight of the world rested on something within those three cups and he was the steward of it. He stirred one of them, watched it spin and steady itself. Then he’d look deeply and stir again. You looked over to his right, and sitting there on the shelf was a baggy. A baggy full of blue pills.
You looked up at your mom on the screen above the freezer, as she looked down into the kitchen without seeing it. She couldn’t see what you were seeing now. Dan had no idea you were standing there, and he had no idea that one of those drinks he was tampering with was meant for you. He just knew that every single person those drinks were meant for had to be out like a light. He needed it to be and was making sure it would be. You saw a determination in his face, morphing it into something unfamiliar to you. Almost shocking. A seriousness, aging him ten years without a single added line or wrinkle. He was clad in the same red and orange apron you had always seen him in, but something in his face evoked the feeling you would have gotten if you had seen him in a three-piece suit just now.
By the time the pills had dissolved to his liking, and he put lids down over the bubbling coke and turned around, you were gone.
He handed you the bag as you stood at the window. “So?” he asked.
“So?” you repeated, blushing.
“Can I?”
“Can you what?” you asked, nervously.
“Can I leave early.”
“Oh,” you said. “Of course.”
As Dan scurried back to the kitchen to get ready to leave, you handed your mom her bag of food, and then you handed her her cardboard tray of drinks. “Thank you,” she said up at you, and smiled.
“Thank you, and have a nice day,” you said.
She caught nothing of note in you. She just smiled. And then she put the car in drive and went off. And as you watched her drive off, you saw Dan trailing behind her on his bicycle. He had lied. The bus wasn’t late. He didn’t come by bus.
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He stood across the street, looking down at his watch. The house before him had at least three people in it now. He knew that. If they had started eating by the time she got into that house, or soon after, they should all be out right now.
He assumed that whoever the other two were, they wouldn’t interest him as much as she did. Something in him told him that she was the only woman in the house. It was just something about buying food that when a woman did it on her own, you could be sure she was doing it for a table full of men, at least more often than not.
He just knew that when he got in there, the two others would look like statues to him, uninteresting, part of the landscape. Whereas she would be glowing the second he seen her. And her body would be a source of possibilities to him beyond anything he had ever chased in life.
“Out of anybody who came today,” he whispered to himself. “It was you.” The opportunity had presented itself to him, shining in his life like a pearl in dirt. And here he stood, about to grab life by the horns. Or rather, grab the blonde by her hair. An image of undivided female nudity, clothed only in blonde hair, invaded his mind. Like a strip club, but without the bouncers and the patrons and the other strippers, just one. Sleeping there. As if a sleeping gas canister went off in the place, and he had just come back from the bathroom to it all snoring. And her waiting for him there on stage. With a G-string full of ones and twenties just to pay him back for what he was about to do to her next.
It was now or never. If he couldn’t go in through the front, he’d enter through a window. He left his bike on the other side of the street, laying across a tree, and he approached the door. It got bigger in his field of vision, starting off like a dream or mirage, but becoming very real as it got closer. Until finally his hand wrapped around the copper tang of the doorknob. His eyes were wide. He turned the knob. The door clicked open.
A neighbor saw him walk inside and close the door behind him. She didn’t say anything. She figured he was just a friend of the family. Either that, or a person there to do some sort of a job. On both counts she was right.
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Joe and Jeffrey were now there, both wondering where Dan was. When you told them he had to leave a few minutes earlier, they both rolled their eyes. “Figures,” said Jeffrey.
They must have been so wrapped up in their own indignation that they hadn’t noticed you were shaking. Maybe it wasn’t as obvious as it felt. Maybe it was easier to feel and hear your teeth chattering from within your body than from without.
You packed up your work clothes and headed outside for the bus, not even saying goodbye to your coworkers. It hadn’t occurred to you until then that your mom must not have realized when your shift ended, otherwise she would have waited a few minutes and given you a lift. It didn’t matter though. The air was apparent to you for the first time in a decade. You could feel it along your skin as you stepped out of the front door and into the street.
You sat at the bus stop next to a homeless man who was talking about a house he had slept in that sat in the wooded outskirts of the campus at the local University, a house which was full of strange books and even stranger noises, a message he spoke to no one in particular. Buses pulled out of traffic, stopped, vomited out a few passengers of all stripes, while taking more in, and then drove off, disappearing back into the indistinguishable mass of traffic that birthed them. That’s when you got a text. It was your brother.
“Mom making anything for supper?”
A pang of worry came over you, one that threatened to envelope you in its fog of war, but then an image came to you. It was Dan’s cock. It was being jerked off by Dan’s hand. And as if superimposed over it, you could see your mom’s face simultaneously, sipping the coke from her paper cup. Calm washed over you. The earth was still. All was silent. And then slowly, as if coming at the pace you required it to, the sounds of cars and an old man’s ramblings sucked back into the world. It was game time now.
You thought about what to say, your thoughts as clear and focused as they ever had been. If your brother knew that dinner was at home waiting for him, he might come at an inconvenient time, you thought. He might come home in the middle of Dan…. You shut your eyes and groaned to yourself. The homeless man was the only one who could hear it. He looked over at you.
You looked back at your work. It sat there. The “Open 24 Hours Sign” glowing, as if in expectation of the approaching twilight.
You texted your brother back: “No. But why don’t you come to my work and we can eat there. Mom says she’s going out for dinner tonight.”
You stand back up and head toward the glass doors. It occurred to you then that you wouldn’t be walking in and out of those doors forever. Your life would eventually move on to bigger and brighter things. You had no idea what those bigger and brighter things were. But you knew that they’d be coming one day, whether you asked for them or not. As you stepped into that familiar space, you cherished it, knowing even it would be gone one day.
You sat down at a table in the corner, and as you did, your phone buzzed. You didn’t even have to look at it to know that you wouldn’t be eaten dinner alone today.
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Your brother’s hand gripped the handle of the front door at the exact moment when Dan’s hand gripped the doorknob back home.
He saw you sitting there at that table waiting for him with an awkward smile, just like Dan saw your mom sitting there waiting for him at the dining room table with her eyes closed.
When you and your brother sat back down at your table in the corners with your orders, Dan set your mom down on the guest cot. As your brother pulled his burger out from its aluminum foil wrapping, Dan pulled your mom’s ass out from under her dress.
Your brother admired the burger and said “It looks good.” Dan stood over your mom and said “Ohhh god.”
And when your brother bit down, Dan, well, here let me show you:
The rich taste of the burger exploded in your brother’s mouth. He had been starving all day, as he was working his ass off, making this meal all the sweeter to him, like beer is after putting up a fence, as if nature itself were trying to reward one for being productive.
Your mom’s pussy slid tightly over Dan’s cock. The sensation was overpowering. “So this is what it’s like?” he thought. He had been deprived of it his whole life, so now that it was finally here, his appreciation for it was unrivalled. He was shocked at how easy it came now. Just a little effort and initiative and he was balls deep into it. It came down full of pressure on all sides of his dick. Your mom’s thick frame pressing in on the place within her his cock opened up. And in doing so, giving his cock incentive to open her up further, feeding the vicious cycle.
“I forgot how good the burgers are here,” your brother said.
“Yeah,” you said. You bit into it and felt the flavors explode in your mouth as if you were having it for the first time. You imagine what it would be like to be one of Dan’s special customers. And that only made you think what it must be like to be a really special customer of Dan. One being stuffed with him, in the mouth, pussy, or asshole. You could remember your mom a million different ways, changed, transformed with the ebb and flow of life from one version of herself to another, but still her. There for you since the very beginning. She was the beginning. And you could remember the first moment you met Dan. How could the world be beautiful enough to let these two world’s smash into each other lengthwise? You couldn’t believe something this exalted and sticky with beauty could ever happen to you.
He’s inside our mom, you thought to yourself, as your brother was saying something to you about somebody you knew nothing about. He had no idea how little the things he was saying mattered. Just buzzing in a world full of it. Mom’s holes are being stuffed. It was a truth with as much gravitas as it was funny. Stuffed with Dan’s cock. Your brother’s face, being oblivious to this gorgeous truth, reflected none of its shine. He was as stoic now as stone.
Dan, the 43-year old frycook, was treating your mom like one of his burgers. That’s what she was, big and delicious. He was filling her with himself like your dad did once upon a time. He was less of a man at 43 than you were at 20, and yet he was you and your brother’s new dad. Your mom’s accountant brain couldn’t sift through those sums if she were completely sober. But now she couldn’t even make sense of the weird feeling in her special place. That legendary cock, the defiler of mouths, spreading its seeds in stomachs across the city, now penetrated your mom, its tip probing to depths only your dad’s could previously.
You knew that he smelled just like the onion rings that you and your brother munched on. You were supposed to be back there too. Lying unconscious somewhere, as Dan fucked your mom in the room with the two of you mumbling sleepy incoherencies into the absurdity of the moment. You wouldn’t mind him seeing you there. If anything, you’d welcome it. And if you were there, you’d want to be knocked out. You’d want him to have his privacy. Anything less would be wrong. Like when you burst in on him standing there, facing the wall, both hands before him, as his body shook. The world shaked, rattled and rolled onward as he was in that house, just him and your mom, alone. No supervisor to come in and chastise him or write him up. He was working now on his own volition, which was stronger than anyone would suspect. Because what he was doing now was… finally… important.
You had heard about what a woman’s netherregions smelled like, and you wondered at whose smell would win out, Dan’s or your mom’s. Would her pussy and mouth smell like onion rings and sweat when it was all over, or would his cock and hips smell like fish and perfume?
You knew Dan had to be talking to her, even though she wasn’t listening. Classic Dan. You laughed at that thought. Your brother looked up at you. “What?”
“No, it’s nothing,” you said.
Out of all the guys who could have fucked your mom, all the doctors and lawyers who tried and failed, it was a fry cook who sealed the deal. Who’s the laughing stock now? It occurred to you then that if Dan could be paid for doing to your mom what he was, he’d be a wealthy man. And why shouldn’t he be paid? If you had just paid to put this low-nutrition garbage into your body, why would you and others not pay for something of so much more impact? He was spreading your mom’s asscheeks open for christ’s sake. His tongue all over her nipples, sucking them like a baby, penetrating her butthole with his finger just because he could. As if the fact that they shared the same birthyear entitled her body to his and meant his fingers should find no obstacle valid.
The only obstacle being the rest of his hand, which was too large to get him in any deeper than his knuckle. He could feel his prick going in and out, its outline semi-coherent, against his index finger through the bottom edge of your mom’s butthole. By pressing down from within her asshole, he could make her pussy tighter against the bottom of his cockhead. He wondered how tight he could make it if he stuffed her asshole with a full corn-on-the-cob. He laughed, looking up at her face, as he entertained the visual.
You looked out at the people walking up and down the street, and all the cars going this way and that. All so busy accomplishing nothing, you thought. You were just barely twenty and you had accomplished more by handing your mom a tray of drinks than any of these people had accomplished in their entire lives. Dan, of all people, had accomplished more, and he did so on a split decision halfway through his life (if the universe would be so kind to provide him with another 43 to melt in the mouth of the humdrum like cotton candy). Proving how easy it was. It was all so close at hand, to everybody, every pair of shoes or high-heels moving up and down the street out there, yet nobody did it.
Your house had now become a circus tent floating outside of space and time, where worry had stopped dead in its tracks and joy took its first muscular step into a running sprint. The roof a turtle shell, the whole thing flipped on its back by a hawk, who was now taking its sweet time eating at the innards. This was all happening as your brother munched and went on and on about number, names, and times. He would have no idea how lucky he was even if you told him – even if he saw it for himself – he wouldn’t get why Dan being there was a good thing. He wouldn’t get why Dan had just made your lives valid. He wouldn’t get why this was the only way to make your lives valid. And he’d destroy it with all types of screams, hits, threats, phonecalls, sirens, and steel bars. Jagged and twisted things which jutted through the war and beauty of it all, like metal pole pushed through the open spaces between Ares and Aphrodite, prohibiting them from continuing in their slapping, panting, pumping, and tasting, though their bodies, each representing the masculine or feminine virtues in their most pronounced, were meant for the comfort and the thrill of the other.
You had no idea a month ago that Dan’s cock was about to become such an important factor in your life. Literally the most important factor. You had no idea that another man’s penis could be so important to you. Never mind Dan’s. A cock which you had never put any thought into before that one shift when you caught it in its glorious machinations. Then you could think of nothing else. You could feel it behind your forehead and taste it in food and hear it being slapped against his stomach in the rain. And now it was that very same piece of flesh, hard and rigid, and probably tasting like hot dog water, which you knew was penetrating your mom now.
Dan was “getting all up in them guts” as he used to say about women who glided through that drivethru. You had no idea that that was literally true if you counted his cum until not too long ago. Now he knew what it was like to feel those guts on his swollen and wanting glands. Your mom being the perfect body, as if built to take and store his virginity and distribute it within and throughout her soft flesh. His being the second virginity she had taken and absorbed within her, her first being your dad’s when both were so much younger. Your mom’s body and face had evolved since then though, and only Dan was here to reap its benefits.
Was it because you were so shy and inexperienced, like a pearl snug within the comfort of its mama clam, that you wanted this? What was it about you that made you get it so? What was it about you that made this whole thing feel like some kind of homecoming, like something you knew you wanted before you even had words to express how much you wanted it? Was it that being kissless and lonely gave you your excuse? Your excuse to enjoy debauchery and sexual subversion? Your excuse to weigh and place bodies along spectrums, not based on any socially determined or accepted axies, but based on whatever multipliers of debauch and sweet perversion was placed not just within them, but within their combinations; as well as within their relations to you and your consciousness.
You knew that having an attractive mom helped. You wondered how many sons with attractive moms wanted what you were enjoying now. And even more, how many of them acted upon that desire? It was all so easy. Drugs made it that way. Why did this not happen more often? It all seemed so strange to you.
You could see cars rolling around the building, exiting the drivethru with their meals in tow. Fast food. Driven through space in fast cars. Passing other fast cars and fast streets to little copy and paste residences that exanded in endless suburbs in all directions. A fast plane passed overhead, taking passengers from one buzzing metropolis to another, not much different than this one. The cities themselves being copy and pasted.
Meanwhile, your mom, a meal in-of-herself, had driven herself home to be enjoyed. She was her own delivery driver. The effort and ease involved were the same. And your mom’s body possessed a fast food-like quality to it. She was a delicious and rich meal, though her mind gave her the gall to believe she was more than that. All it took was one little pill to take her from an exclusive, book-by-appointment, cliffside bistro, overlooking the Atlantic, filet mignon with wine; dragging her kicking and screaming from that vision of herself, a self-image that all women shared, and placing her within that little white cardboard box, emblazoned with that familiar red and orange, and served at any of the dozens of drivethrus which littered the streets of your city, and all cities like it, cities themselves being litter across the planet.
You were happy when your state boosted its minimum wage, but what good was a boost in minimum wage if it still meant that the bulk of female bodies, bodies you could see before you now, were off-limits to the great mass of man that they threaded their paths through, like strings pulled tight through and around the arms and sides of terracotta soldiers? Women were beautiful. Their minds weren’t. Fucking was beautiful. The greatest enemy of fucking was women. They stood in its path at every moment they could. Stood there with the same bodies men desired to fuck to begin with, and arrogantly, as if they had the right, obstructed what was so close at any given moment, separating it from view with walls of cloth, thin enough to make its obscurity maddening in effect and nefarious in purpose.
And you lived a world shaped by their bodies. And you could see this world’s shape. Ugly and dry in comparison. A world full of worker bees, trying to stack enough objects and respect to even be noticed by women. All of this around you, its monotony and repetition, its cruelty and metallic lustre, the result of men trying to get women to let them have some fun with them, just once. The greatest of mankind’s philosophies, devices and structures being nothing compared to the body and face of a half-way attractive woman’s ass, even if it were flat, but when round achieving a beauty without name or equal worth.
You thought about it all collapsing around you. The fires in the distant skyline, as the women who walked so freely just beyond that glass, ran and screamed in vain, as men, who had now reverted to their barbarian selves as soon as the social contract was torn by the fire of collapse, chased them through the streets, eager to make their existences wonderful, even if against their will, the control of who touched them being their only real conviction, and therefore the only thing they’ve ever truly feared being torn from them, even more so than their clothing itself.
And that’s what was happening to your mom now. Her life was being made wonderful, whether she wanted it to be or not. For one solitary moment, you were above it all. Your mom was above it all. Your brother was above it all. And it was all thanks to Dan. She was the conquered but not unvanquished. And Dan was the first barbarian to breach the city gates, where only women, children and elderly were left unguarded, the fighting aged males being dead on the field just outside, their sisters, mothers, and daughters ripe for the picking within, the ultimate price of failure, or the ultimate reward for victory.
Their physical inability to fight off the muscles and pricks of their grinning attackers their only saving grace against annihilation. And their proficiency at household chores, their insufficiency at the logistics of armed rebellion or escape, and the knowledge that they could be forced to eat the sweaty ass of a cackling houseguest at any time, the last morsel of mercy dragging them through the light of the living world, even if dragged by the fetters of slavery. A life of milking cattle, cooking mutton, and tonguing assholes exposed by hairy hands pulling apart hairy buttcheeks. Amelia Earhart and Susan B. Anthony had nothing on those women. Not in purpose or accomplishment or worth.
As you looked out at the air-conditioned nightmare, buildings that poked at the clouds downtown, each its own individual Babel, you probed at it all with the harshness of thought. The roots of this whole façade. Not just how little each root meant, but about how you would have to work to maintain their surface legitimacy. Because it was only through a stable snowglobe of a life that this beauty you had now become acquainted with could be experienced in any prolonged manner. Buildings have to be constructed for the back-alley ravisher to obscure his paths and shadows, leaving him to breath heavily in the dark, outside yet within walls, as if walls were always a part of the natural geography of things, these building being discovered, not built. Garbage would have to be accrued in atrocious mountains in order to justify the dumpsters these enterprising souls dragged their targets behind. The workweek would have to be as taxing on the body and soul as ever to make it a joy to spend the few days off inside a dark club, too hammered wet with liquid to notice something being slipped into the tangy embrace of one’s drink.
Women needed to look pretty, covered in makeup made in busy labs across the land in lots where tumbleweeds once rolled through. They needed to stay healthy and in a shape pleasing to the male gaze in thriving gyms that replaced the exercise provided for by the labors of hunting and war. They needed running water to keep themselves fresh and their hair soft, making their hair nice to run one’s hands through without meeting twigs and insects. Message boards needed electricity so men across the world could share tips and trade secrets on how to slip that unsuspecting capsule into that lucky girl’s unattended-for drink, the way they used to discuss divvying up an enemies supply of butt-cheeks and toes before a raid. And drug dealers who sold those pills needed fronts to launder that money in, as society’s third-eye had been so poked blind that all failed to see them for what they were, the village medicine men of old.
Police officers needed the authority that only comes with the duty to stop criminals in order for some of them to abuse that authority by searching the holes of a woman caught drinking and driving on the side of the interstate (or women who they threatened to frame for drinking and driving). And the military needed funding so that soldiers from one nation could go to another and have their way with women who were exotic to them (if the top brass would be so accommodating as to kindly turn their heads for the sake of a gentlemen’s harmless fun with a captured local as his brother-in-arms forced the rest of the family to watch at the point of an assault rifle).
It was all starting to come together for you. Its purpose and its validity. The invisible hand of civilization, belonging to no one man, an anarchy of boredom, all existed to do what Dan’s cock was doing to your mom right now. Even this establishment you and your brother both sat in, offered you a place away from home so that Dan could attend to his business uninterrupted. The inventions of walls in-of-themselves built, as if by providence, for this very moment.
And then it had all hit you at once. The shape of civilization. The paths that criss-crossed in infinite variations up and down and along in every direction around you. They were all headed in the same direction, so much so that you were worried the whole thing would start to unravel now that their purpose was reached.
The naked male body, a glorified shaved ape, pounded into the flesh of an angel. That was what all of this was for. It was mankind, the risen ape, taking its shot at something perfect and of God. Against all odds. Dan grunted and exhaled animalistically as he fucked your mom. Your mom, a heavenly perfection that was now made open to him. His cock the Tower of Babel, and her wet pussy the Heavens.
And when he felt it coming on, some part of him knew that this could be his first ever cumming inside a woman, but he opted instead to pull out and finish all over her pretty and unguarded face. The first drop hitting her eyelid, sealing her eye shut, provided for the strength of the rest of it, his nut thick and delicious, icing the sweetness of her expression. He had more than enough to coat each landmark on that landscape of a mug. It came so thick and endlessly that he was sure that he was tapping parts of his balls he had never drew from before. By the time he was done, everything that was in his balls were now visible before him on your mom’s face.
Your mom balanced his nut comically, holding it up like Atlas underneath a flat planet. He had no top burger bun to place over it. Nor any cardboard container (he had both available to him on the dining room table but he opted not to use those). Instead he just put on his pants and left the house. Your mom lay there, covered in his seed, it heavy on her face, as he grabbed his bike across the street, a sight which could conceivably be viewed from your living room window, and pedaled off. Your mom’s wallet sat open across the hardwood floor. Her credit cards and cash missing. The only thing he left in it was her photographs of the three of you. Seeing you in those photos would be the last time he’d see you ever again. You’d also have to work extra hard this summer. Your mom’s college fund for you left with him on a bus to Mexico. As did your brother’s money for the remainder of law school.
The sound of his spokes were audible from where she sat inside. They died off as he went down the street and then everything went silent, as if the world outside had just stopped.
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“That was great,” your brother said. “It’s been a while since I ate here.”
You just smiled at him.
“Hmm,” he said.
“What?”
“I’m still a little bit hungry.”
“Want another one?” you asked.
He smiled. “I think I do.”
You stood up and headed for the kitchen. “Wait here.”
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“I’m going to make you my special,” you said and you smiled.
As you approached the kitchen, you asked if you could make one a burger for your brother.
“Sure,” said Jeffrey. “You mind if I go out and smoke then?”
You told him you didn’t mind and you put on an apron. Your cock, still hard with knowledge of what was happening/what had happened to your mom. It had been a while since you last had burger duty.
You grabbed a patty from the open package next to the grill and you threw it on. You enjoyed the sound of it sizzling. And when it was done to perfection, you threw it on a nice clean bun. You looked down at it, then over at the lettuce, tomato, and condiments. Then you thought about your mom. You thought about her face, the same face that woke you up inches from it, grinning, on your birthday mornings. So closely that you could smell her hair. Then you saw Dan jerking off. And then a droplet hit your mom’s forehead. And another one. And another one. Until a gushing torrent of cum falls all over that pretty, smiling face.
Your cock gets rock hard.
You take off your apron with a finished burger on the shelf just as Jeffrey comes back in. “Thanks for covering for me, man.”
“No problem,” you say, and you pick up your creation and head back out. Your brother sits there smiling, waiting for it. You hand it to him and sit down.
“It looks good,” he says. “You sure it’s safe to eat?” he asks jokingly.
“Yeah, yeah,” you say, and smile.
He takes his first bite. “Mmm,” he says. “This is good. You made it?”
“Yeah,” you said, grinning at him.
“This is really good. I think it’s better than the last one. And I was hungrier then.”
“Really?”
“Yeah,” he said, and bit into it again. “How’d you do it?”
You just continued smiling for a moment, your eyes aglow, and you told him the only thing you could: “It’s just my secret ingredient.”
He looked at you, nodded his head, and then he took another bite.