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by M.K. Hobson
Humor, 28 pages.
Originally Published in SCI FICTION, 2005
(1) Rate this Story Down the street from Burrell & Drummond, the agency where I used to work, there’s this Chinese buffet restaurant called the Cheerful Panda. I haven’t been near the place since the owner, a man named Uncle Chao, called me a soulless bastard and said that if I didn’t get my goddamn borrowed RV out of his parking lot he’d chop up my heart and use it to stuff egg rolls.
Uncle Chao’s face got very red when he was yelling at me that last time. It was a particularly powerful red, a nice bright purplish red, the kind of red consumers eat up with a spoon. Uncle Chao Red. I remember thinking it would test well. You start thinking like that after a while. Like the blue of the sky would look good on a soap box, or the green of a newly unfurled leaf would be a great color for a cell phone faceplate.
Marketing is Hell.
In all fairness, Uncle Chao’s face had every right to be that particular shade of red. I would have been angry too, if some soulless bastard drove an RV into my parking lot with the intention of cheerfully laying waste to everything I’d ever worked for. I would have killed me.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
It was the middle of a long miserable winter. Icy arctic blasts alternated with stretches of unseasonable warmness when the snowy streets turned to rivers of gray mush. I’d wasted the morning on a couple of clients; an elderly pair who owned two dozen down-home drive-ins dotted across rural Alabama. He wore a faded Hornets sweatshirt; she wore a pantsuit of polyester double-knit. They were on the verge of bankruptcy.
They’d been serving burgers and fries since the ‘50s, but now they were being crowded out by the big national chains. My agency was going to repackage them, give them an edge, bring them into the 21st century. With great gravitas, I swore to mercilessly tax every fiber of my creativity and marketing savvy until everything was coming up roses for them.
Lying makes me hungry, so after that meeting I headed over to O’Reilly’s for lunch. It’s the kind of place where men in uncomfortable suits swap sports stats with painfully fake bonhomie. My kind of place.
Looking back on it now, I figure I must have passed the Cheerful Panda a thousand times on my way to O’Reilly’s, though I never noticed it. I probably wouldn’t have noticed it that day either, but within minutes of revolving myself out of the brass-fitted doors of my office building, the low gray clouds overhead exploded like an overstuffed down comforter, sending hordes of damp sticky snowflakes to violate my new $3,500 cashmere overcoat. I needed to duck inside somewhere.
I paused in front of the Cheerful Panda. The price of admission ($5.95 lunch $6.95 dinner plus tax all you can drink off-brand beverages included and soft-serve vanilla ice-cream for dessert) didn’t inspire confidence. But icy wet was beginning to seep through the toes of my wingtips, so in I went.
A little doorbell tinkled, a bit of cheer that wasn’t much of a bulwark against the restaurant’s overwhelming air of shoddy despondency. There was a thick coating of dust on the fake plastic flowers that decorated the white-trellised walls and the fiberglass bas-relief dragon was missing a horn. I made a mental note not to brush against anything.
A surly woman with a huge hair-sprouted mole on one side of her nose directed me to table. She made a great show of removing the second paper-wrapped place setting from my table so that it could be used for another (implicitly more important) customer. She brought me water in a dirty amber glass. It smelled funny.
Before I even had a chance to unwrap my silverware, a loud “thud” caught my attention. The kitchen’s swinging doors flew open, and a woman in a cook’s uniform strode over to the buffet line. She was carrying a steaming hot serving dish. One look at her, and my chest abruptly turned into porridge somewhere between my Adam’s Apple and my breadbasket.
Her eyes were green. Her face was perfectly oval, as luminous as the halo of a painted saint. Her black hair was glossy as hot tar, and it wisped tantalizingly around her face as if she’d just exited a scene of extreme passion.
She placed the steaming dish in the buffet line, pausing to wave a hand over it, like a priest blessing a baptized infant. Then she went back into the kitchen, giving the doors another bad-tempered kick with a heavy black combat boot.
I made my way over to the buffet line. I took a plate (scraping a dessicated grain of rice from it with my thumbnail) and went to the dish she had brought out.
They say the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, so I suppose it’s no wonder that the twice-cooked pork the beautiful chef placed in that depressing buffet line kicked me in the mouth like a South American soccer superstar with bad aim. There was never twice-cooked pork like the twice-cooked pork I tasted that snowy day at the Che -- [End of Preview.]