With a Voice that is Often Still Confused But is Becoming Ever Louder and Clearer

by J. R. Hamantaschen

  The poor kidult, though, registered the blow, toppled backwards off his chair, and quite literally exploded into chunky fragments. Tables overturned, the red sauce in the pasta appetizer got a new thickener, the drinks new bloody garnishes.

  “AND SO IT BEGINS!”

  Alexander worked himself into a frenzy, a rabid dog. No, worse than a rabid dog. He contorted his back and his joints, head-banging, a man in perpetual spasm. He gnawed and raged, tore and ripped. A substance the shape of bologna and the consistency of caviar extended out from his breast. He torn it out and threw it to the horrified onlookers, where it somehow splattered, shattered and rolled into four separate pieces, their momentum never stopping, picking up speed, the velocity of their movement the same whether it rolled or used its still-growing but still powerful lunging legs. Four pieces of sentient, Spam-like meat, Krystal thought, the only one of her party able to process what was enveloping before her. But those thoughts were gone when the creature was fully upon her, squishy and suffocating, and there was nothing sharp about it, then unbearable pain and her top half skidding along the greased floor, recognizing her separated lower half by the tight Theory jeans she’d just bought yesterday.

  A star-faced mole jumped atop the sentient strips of meat and hissed. It dipped the prongs of its face into her bloodied wound and, contented, it scampered off to further its feasting.

  More and more of his minions were assembling. An army. An Army of One, he thought, and that seemed right, since they originated from within him, from the pieces he tore off himself, from the sheer determination of his iron will. A floating pineapple of eyeballs. The star-faced mole: that was an inventive one. A McDonaldland Grimace in a Viking helmet. Head crabs.

  Bodies ascending and descending and dividing into uneven quarters. The chaos and abandon was too much and too unplanned — he wanted to hold some of the chaos in abeyance, understand exactly what he was working with, try and plan certain punishments for certain people. Truth was, he just acted; he had no idea what he would be conjuring up. Hell, he didn’t even initially plan for any of the customers to get hurt, it just happened; a sentiment he’d accepted as he stared at the fresh corpse of a hipster beardo, eyes-bugged out, a white gelatinous square the texture of tripe wrapped tightly around his mouth.

  Why did he feel bad, of all things? He should move beyond that. That should be beneath him. Morality was for other people.

  Out of the corner of his eye he recognized Manny, the head chief, bolting straight out from the kitchen and toward the front doors.

  He extended an open hand toward his closest minions — dark-brown, round creatures the size and shape of bowling balls, covered in cross-cutting, viciously sharp quills. They even rolled like bowling balls. Three of them were rapaciously chewing on what, at some point, had been a face. In a moment of accentuated detail, he saw one cleanly chomp off several fingers from a disembodied hand, make an awkward face following the crunch of what must have been a wedding ring, constrict its face as it made a hearty swallow, and reveal what may have been a smile.

  “Critters,” he called them unthinkingly. “Attack!” And he pointed at a fleeing Manny. Manny turned back for the briefest of moments, saw the finger directing the attack upon him, and resumed bolting, emitting something like a guttural yelp.

  The creatures continued their chewing. The three of them formed almost a triangle. They shook while they ate like gulls imbibing live fish.

  “Attack!” he directed again. The creatures continued unabated and undisturbed.

  Even among the ruckus, Alexander heard a loud smack and knew it was Manny, falling hard. His vision was obscured by booths and tables, but he distinctly heard Manny yell, a yell that lessoned in intensity and volume until it sounded like it was coming somewhere more remote, maybe underwater. Alexander adjusted his position to see what had happened, to find a hazy outline of Manny, visible through the translucent sheen of whatever jellyfish-like creature he’d disappeared into. The creature sat with the repose of a giant toad, even as protesting hands pushed tiny stalagmite-like ripples through the base of its head. A few seconds later, some adjustment, and ambiguous motions later, the movement stopped, the mass of what was Manny subtracted, like sand from an hourglass.

  Luck smiled upon Alexander. How could he be in the wrong, when everything was now so right, when fate convened to give him these powers and make sure his harassers got their just rewards? He’d commend that creature, promote it somehow, even though he knew not what that meant and feared they cared not a whit for or about him.

  He saw a tall blonde girl outside the restaurant, looking in, pounding on the glass, sheer terror and desperation on her face. She pounded, and lost resolve, descending for a moment into a crescendo of tears as her friends were digested before her.

  “Get her!” he yelled as a general command.

  If there was any discernable change in the arrangement of the battlefield, he was unaware.

  “Get her. Make sure she does not escape!” Somehow, the woman outside clued into what he was saying or directing, and ran.

  She escaped out of sight.

  “Get her! You let her escape!” He pondered how many other people had simply escaped, and concluded it must have been many. This was chaos, and he and his minions appeared to be on different wavelengths. He wanted swift, organized justice. They seemed content just being fed.

  “More food. Food. In the kitchen. Plenty of food. Live food.”

  He hadn’t taken a tally on how many of his minions had been wreaking havoc, but he suspected plenty had left the restaurant already to satisfy their own devices. There was certainly less commotion than when he started. He looked for the star-faced mole — that was his favorite, the one he was most impressed with — and couldn’t locate it. There were panes of broken glass and open doors. As to make the abandonment all the more obvious and embarrassing, there was a green, viscous trail way of slime leading from the center of the dining room straight out of the front entrance.

  The Critters were still here — one was face-deep, or perhaps body-deep, since the entire creature seemed to consist solely of a face — its Sonic-like quills cresting out of the inner cavity of a corpse like a chest-shark. Another sat on its haunches, its stubby legs sticking out, not a care in the world, perhaps even vibrating as it burped through its meal.

  He walked closer to the Critters — they for some reason becoming his lodestar — a feeling of oppressive ineffectuality gathering in his chest. He accidentally kicked the soft frame of an over-sized slug. Its delineated head raised and twisted 360 degrees; its head was that of a horrifyingly real, too-scaly and too-green Hypnotoad. Its head lowered down and it ignored him, though a weird ambient slushing noise emanating from its midsection became temporarily louder.

  He feared it would strike him. He tried to look casual and avoided eye contact.

  What have we here?

  Wedged in the corner underneath a table, where the booth meets the wall. A quivering, shivering young lady. Well, not that young, more like youngish, maybe in her thirties. He assumed a squatting position, reached underneath, felt the firm, impressive outline of her lower body, and began dragging her out. She screamed and kicked, jamming one of his fingers. It took him longer to pull her out than it should have. He wrapped both his arms around her ankles and pulled, but she was stronger than she let on and held onto the edge of the booth. His minions heard the tussling and turned in his direction (with the exception of the floating pufferfish, which continued staring vacantly ahead, drifting listlessly).

  He tugged hard enough, hard enough that her hands gave way and she slid on her back out from under the booth. He tugged so hard that he fell back, hard, on his ass, like an obese woman crashing through a lawn chair. Christ, he landed so hard, with such emphasis on his ass, he half-expected this was a comedy bit and he’d just landed in a pie or dog shit or something.

  From her back, she l
aunched herself forward and rained punches down on the bridge of his nose. With his hands now covering his face, she took the opportunity and bolted up and ran.

  She shrieked, turned and surveyed the confusing, intimidating landscape. Overcome with nausea, sensory overload — soft round organs, bright streaky blood, violent, puncturing angles — and ran to the first opening that was unguarded. The kitchen.

  “Follow her. She ran into the kitchen. Follow her, there is more back there. Food.

  “But don’t eat her. I want her for myself.”

  >< >< ><

  Bryce looked into the mirror and sighed with a heavy heart. He checked his phone. Twenty-three minutes. He had been in the bathroom twenty-three minutes. What would overcome her first, he wondered, her hunger from waiting, or her repulsion about wondering what could possibly take him twenty-three minutes in the toilet. Maybe her revulsion canceled her hunger out? Wishful thinking. He half-expected to find out that she left. Maybe she thought he bailed. God, can you imagine that? Shitting for such an inhumanly long length of time that your date can rationally, plausibly conclude that it’s more likely that you abandoned her than you were just fulfilling an unfortunate human need.

  Maybe it’d be better if she did leave. Less embarrassing, perhaps, than going out there and seeing her face and coming up with some small talk to deflect the 500-pound floating piece of shit in the punch bowl.

  He adjusted himself in the mirror and again liked what he saw. He looked good. This sweater fit him well. His skin was largely blemish-free, his recently shorn hair respectably stylish. He fake-smiled, sighed again, washed his hands like he was about to perform an appendectomy, and made his way out.

  He left the Men’s room (or whatever room he had turned into the Men’s room), turned right, and pushed open the sliding door that connected the bathroom area to the dining room. He pushed it partway open until it moved no further. He pushed harder, and it made a little bit of headway. Okay, be cool, he thought. The odds of being stuck in the bathroom are pretty slight. God, can you imagine that? As if a twenty minute sojourn into shitting wasn’t conspicuous enough, he announces his return by being publicly stuck in the bathroom? He retained his composure and tried again, simultaneously pushing the door and trying to wedge himself through the opening. The door snapped back a little when he transitioned his energy from the pushing to the wedging, and it socked him in the lip, as if throwing a quick jab. His nose and lip burned with that angry, unpleasant energy of an unexpected jolt, like when you smash your funny bone or...well, get hit in the face with a door.

  God, can you imagine if I’m bleeding now? Imagine that? Gone in the bathroom for twenty-plus minutes and return BLEEDING. It literally made him laugh. Maybe that’d be for the best, maybe he could say he was mugged in there or something. Can you imagine launching a police investigation to save face? He laughed despite himself.

  He kept his head down and made a beeline for where he knew his table to be. He didn’t see her sitting where she should be sitting, and he looked down and his stomach burned and sank. God, could it be possible that she actually did leave? The burning in his stomach became a stabbing, sinking feeling of despair.

  That idea didn’t seem so funny anymore.

  He slipped on an outrageous pool of liquid and went bowlegged, then slipped forward and went down, hard. He landed on his left shoulder, splayed out on his left side, and closed his eyes. He was in some kind of liquid: water, he assumed. But it smelled bad, almost copper-like. Toilet water. Imagine that. Imagine I shit myself, spent twenty minutes in the bathroom, bloodied my nose on the door, and then fell in fucking smelly water in front of an entire restaurant. Kill me. He closed his eyes. Just let me fucking die here. Let me close my eyes and never wake up.

  No one rushed to help him up, he didn’t hear any exhalation of energy from the restaurant-goers, no “whoops” or “ohhhs” or anything. Perhaps they were all in stunned silence, mortified on his behalf.

  He turned to his side and looked into what, yesterday, may have formed the base of a perfectly acceptable face. Plucked from its roots, it was now a garish lopsided curlicue of bone, teeth and sinew. He jolted and shot out a hand and my god, the texture of the thing, it was emulsified, the base of it stayed put and sunk into itself. He screamed, stood up —;

  and saw all that was before him.

  He said nothing, and stared. Somewhere in the back of his mind, in the smarter part of his subconscious, he recalled a quote. One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic. All this, laid before him, all deathly silent but there, all there, all these people and their derivative parts. The thick wire framed glasses of a guy he recognized had been sitting next to them. Several such glasses, actually; Clark-Kent styled glasses had obviously been popular at this hipstery-eatery, there were so many varieties: broken ones, bloodied ones, some still dangling from faces. He registered the gallows humor but didn’t laugh. He just turned back around. He wanted to slowly walk into the bathroom and blow his brains out, but he didn’t have a gun and he couldn’t move.

  He looked back over his shoulder. A green, hulking creature, gait of a gorilla, all strong shoulders and long arms, dragged the relatively well-preserved corpse of what appeared to be a teenaged boy. The creature dragged the dead boy to a certain, inexplicable point, and then, with three-foot arms outstretched, launched him up over the banister to the top floor of the restaurant. There wasn’t the loud thud you’d expect, but rather a soft bristling of vegetation, like the body had landed in a nest.

  The creature lumbered across the room, in no rush, to do the same with another body.

  “Robin,” he called out. “Robin! Robin! Robin, are you here!?” If he’d thought about it rationally, he wouldn’t have done it. There was no doubt this creature was already aware of his presence, and with that strength, could easily snap him in two.

  The creature registered his presence for a second or two, and then dumbly continued its task. It had a simple, unamused simian look.

  “Robin!” he yelled again, this time pivoting in place to yell it across the entire dining hall. “Robin, are you here!?” He heard a loud cracking pop from outside, the sound that Hollywood told him was a hand gun.

  Jesus. Somehow, the sound of something so concrete and familiar — Thank you Hollywood, and God Bless America — brought him back to reality. He scanned the bottom floor as comprehensively as he allowed himself to, and saw no sign of Robin or her clothes or anything else identifying. His search became so frantic that, instead of regarding with a sense of wonder the oval slug possessing the face of a monstrous toad, he thought of it as nothing more than a fat, wasteful impediment, an inconvenience.

  Maybe she ran away, maybe she got away. He walked toward the closest door, which opened to a hallway which led to the kitchen.

  >< >< ><

  “Did you ever see the movie Critters? Well, did you?”

  She nodded, the nod of a trapped victim buying time with a terrorist. She was pinned in the corner, surrounded by this bubbling facsimile of a man, supported by his flanking fan of four vicious-looking, squat creatures. They did look like the creatures from the movie Critters. That was the first thing she thought of, too.

  “‘Crites,’ they were called in the movie. They look just like them.” Alexander pointed this out to his captive audience. The creatures chattered and stood there, their small limbs and tiny hands folded, their large mouths, row-after-row of sharp and grinding teeth, their cherry-red cat-like eyes.

  “Are you a Crite?” he turned and spoke to the nearest creature. “Are you a Crite? Is that where you came from, is that what you are called? I loved that movie as a kid. That has to be what you are.”

  None of them seemed to respond, maintaining their deathless, voracious gaze. The only difference among them was one of them breathed with a heavy wheeze.

  “Someone call the prop department,” he joked to no one.

&nb
sp; He turned back to face her.

  “So what do you think of all this?” he asked her.

  She shook her head, unsure of how to answer, but knowing that she had to keep the conversation going. The more he viewed her as someone to talk to, the less likely he was to kill her. It was hard to look at him; the area around his lips looked like bubble wrap fashioned out of pastrami.

  “I’m trying to identify all the … monsters, I guess, that are here. I think I saw one of those plants from Super Mario Brothers before, you know, those red-and-white plants that come out of the green pipes? That was cool.” He smiled, and it was horrible, a mass of bleeding caviar rearranging itself into a human expression. “I feel my face changing, and I’m happy about it. I wanted to change my face, and I feel like it’s happening. I’m getting stronger, it must be.

  “I don’t understand why it’s so gross, though. I don’t like that. Why does it always have to be gross? Why can’t it be something beautiful? I can’t even see it, but I can just tell it’s gross, the way it feels.”

  He looked down at his hands. They were wider and broader than human hands should be, and it was harder to demarcate the separate fingers. There was a hazy filament of hair catching the light.

  “What should we do, guys?” he asked the four Critters standing behind him. Funny, they looked like cheesy props, almost; they looked flat and unreal, like projections on a screen. They didn’t seem fully-textured, like there were important details missing, like how they smelled — that’s right, come to think of it, they didn’t seem to have any discernable smell.

  “Even when my fantasies come true, I’m not in control, I guess.” His face had changed so much that his expressions weren’t readily classifiable. “So, what should we do? To be honest, I don’t really want to kill you. I only wanted to get revenge on the people who worked here, and not really, I don’t know. I think I just wanted to scare them. I wanted to scare the manager but I didn’t even see him today. I don’t really know what to do, to be honest.”