Tails
You Lose
The people on the coin were eating dinner. Or maybe lunch. Sarah
tilted the coin to catch the light and looked more closely. A long
table with a bunch of people sitting around it occupied the center of
the coin, and she could swear they were eating a meal. She turned it
over. On this side, it looked like a phone booth with a couple of
people in it. Was this the obverse or the reverse? The side with the
phone booth (and what were those people doing in there, anyway?) had
a date at the bottom, if “666V13.1” was a date, and around the
rim some kind of writing she’d never seen before. The other side
had more writing around the rim, and the dining-room scene in the
middle (was it supposed to be the Last Supper?). That was it. The
coin was shiny and unworn, as if it had been minted just minutes
before she found it lying on the ground. She flipped the coin and
caught it, and was just about to stuff it in her pocket when
something caught her eye. Had one of the people at the table …
changed position? She really couldn’t see the details well
enough, but she could have sworn she’d actually seen one of the
people move. A thrill ran through her of mingled fear and excitement.
She had always secretly believed that someday, something magical
would happen to her. She could hardly keep from breaking into a trot
as she hurried home to look at the coin with a magnifying glass.
Back at the apartment she sat in full sun, scrutinizing the coin with
a 5X lens. She didn’t see anybody move, but she was almost sure
that the table scene had changed slightly. “This is crazy,” she
muttered. She turned the coin over, looked through the lens again.
The people in the phone booth definitely were fucking. And hadn’t
the woman been looking the other way before? Sarah tilted the coin to
enhance the shadows. The woman’s expression seemed … strained.
She didn’t look like she was having a good time. Back to the other
side. With the hand lens she could read the tiny letters around the
rim. She sounded them out loud as she read them:
Aach phthuighltn d’sjarathgh
chu’ulgthln. Mngwlthnath fesht’ g’harashkkt.
It was odd, she thought: the words looked unpronounceable but they
rolled off her tongue as if she’d said them a million times.
As she’d begun speaking a peculiar feeling had come over her, and
as she spoke the last word it swept over her like a speeding train.
She fell out of her chair and squeezed her eyes shut, head spinning
and stomach lurching, feeling around on the floor for the coin. She
found … a fork. Her vertigo receded and she sat up. Somebody
wrenched the fork out of her hand and her eyes flew open on a scene
of chaos. She was sitting on the floor beside her overturned chair.
In front of her was a long wooden table, and all about her people
were scrabbling about on the floor, feeling underneath her, sticking
their hands into her pockets (and elsewhere) and shoving and slapping
each other in their eagerness to find whatever it was they were
looking for. A grossly fat man plunged both of his hands inside her
bra. He seemed to be checking her breasts for lumps. She slugged him
as hard as she could and stuck an elbow in whoever was feeling around
inside the back of her panties. She pulled herself to her feet and
readjusted her clothing. Everyone else stood up too, except for one
tall, emaciated woman who kept crawling around on the floor and
trying to lift up people’s feet.
“Did anyone find the coin?” the fat man asked.
“Nah,” replied a middle-aged man standing beside her, “she must
have dropped it.” He stuck out his hand. “Welcome to the feast,”
he said, “my name is Roger.”
“Crap.” The fat man waddled to the head of the table and sat
down.
“Um.” Sarah didn’t really know what to say. A young man smiled
and patted her shoulder. She stepped back.
“Don’t worry,” he said, “I dropped mine too. I’m Bill.”
He reached to pat her again, then thought better of it.
Roger picked up her chair and placed it in front of a clean place
setting, offering her the seat. She hesitated, then sat down, and he
seated himself in the chair on her left. Everyone else drifted back
to the table and sat down. Even the tall woman crawled out from under
the table.
To Sarah’s right a plump gray-haired woman with heavy eyebrows
scowled at her and resumed eating fried chicken. Sarah looked around.
About 20 people sat at the table, which filled about half the room.
The walls were covered with what looked like medieval tapestries. The
subject matter seemed to be entirely gustatory. She did not see any
doors.
She examined her place setting. She had a plate, soup bowl, cup, wine
glass, silverware, and cloth napkin. She even had a damp washcloth in
a small bowl. She didn’t have any food, but a double row of dishes
down the center of the table was piled high with cornbread, bread
sticks, dinner rolls, boiled shrimp, hush puppies, chowder, barbecued
ribs, fried chicken, six or seven casseroles, at least three
stir-fried dishes, mounds of steamed and fried rice, salads, a pile
of corn on the cob, cake, cookies, several different soups, and a lot
of stuff she couldn’t see very clearly from where she was sitting.
There was plenty to drink too. She saw at least a dozen carafes of
wine, as well as tea, water, and pink lemonade. Everyone else at the
table was eating and drinking steadily, if without obvious signs of
pleasure. Many of them were watching her surreptitiously.
She turned to the woman on her right and introduced herself.
“Hettie,” the woman said, and put down her drumstick. She wiped
her lips and took a sip of water. “You want to know how you got
here, what is this place? Et cetera? Ask one of the men, they’ll be
delighted to fill you in. I’m hungry.” She picked up the
drumstick again.
Bill was sitting directly across from her. He smiled and brushed his
hair out of his eyes. He poured some white wine into her glass from a
carafe. “It’s the coin,” he said, “you read the spell aloud
and it transported you here. This place is just … this room.
There’s nothing else. No windows, no doors, no alcoves or
vestibules. Nothing. We eat. Sometimes we throw food.” He took a
drink. “Have some wine. It’s good.”
She sipped cautiously. The wine was almost tasteless. She set the
glass down. “What do you do when you have to, um, relieve
yourself,” she asked.
Hettie laughed shortly. “Did you see a bathroom on the coin?”
“Yeah, that’s what we have windows for,” called the fat man at
the end of the table, “and we don’t have any windows.” He
belched loudly and stuffed a dinner roll into his mouth.
“Come on guys, go easy on her.” Bill smiled at Sarah again. “You
don’t have to … you know. You never get full either. And we don’t
run out of food. I don’t know why. Want some chicken?”
Sarah shook her head. “I’m not hungry.”
“You will be,” the tall thin woman declaimed in a piercing voice.
“You’ll spend eternity here, eating the same bland food day after
day, getting hungrier and hungrier, never being satisfied. It’s
Hell’s version of the Last Supper. We are all being punished. What
did you do?” She pointed at Sarah with a bread stick.
‘Well, I don’t know,” Sarah replied, “as far as I know I
didn’t even die.”
“Look,” an old man about half-way down the table said
impatiently, “here’s how it works. You read the words aloud. You
end up here. You stay here until you get ahold of a coin, which those
of us with a little presence of mind bring with us. Someone else can
use that coin to escape. We don’t know where they go, but they get
the hell out of here. You’re going to be here a long time. Pass the
beans.”
“Don’t mind him,” Roger whispered, “he’s been here a very
long time and most of the food disagrees with him. Gives him terrible
gas.”
“What about the phone booth?” Sarah asked. “Is there any way to
get there?”
The old man snorted in disgust. “Obviously, you read the words on
the other side, you go to the god-damn phone booth. And don’t pay
any attention to those two love-struck mooncalves. They haven’t
been here long. Soon enough they’ll be able to think of nothing but
food, same as the rest of us. Pass me some more of that tasteless
garbage.” He pointed at a plate of ribs.
“Trust me, you don’t want the phone booth,” Hettie said. “The
guy in there is hung like a humpback whale.”
“Tell me about it!” added Roger. He picked up his fork and
resumed eating.
END
Published in Gods and Monsters, a collection of speculative flash fiction published by Popcorn Press. Available there and from Amazon.
