Purgatory isn’t quite what I expected

“You polished that one off right quick.” Cheryl said, taking away the empty dish from my booth. 

“You need a refill on that drink, hun?” She asked.

“Nah I’m good, Cheryl. Let’s just get this over with.”

“Sure thing, I’ll be back out in just a minute.” She said before heading to the swinging doors that led to the kitchen.

I motherfuckin’ hate Applebees. Between the ‘vintage’ Americana plastered to every wall and the dim lighting the place is just damn depressing. Pick a lane and stick to it, I say. If you wanna pretend to be a fancy pub take some of the shit off the walls and maybe get some tables that aren’t made from the yellow laminate wood they let kids scribble on in pre-school. 

Oh and maybe serve me some food that isn’t slop from a fuckin microwave. I don’t mind shitty junk food, in fact, I just might like it too much. But don’t take a Pinto and parade it out in front of me calling it a Porsche.

I may be dumb, but I’m not stupid, ya know?

I slammed my fist into said laminate table, earning me a glance from Dick and Balls over at the bar. They were here every damn day, but had never spoken a word to me. Hell, I don’t even think I had ever heard them speak to each other. Quick as they had turned my way, they lost interest and went back to nursing their hose water ‘Dollaritas’, once again fading into background props for the drab locale. 

Yep. I hated Applebees, yet here I was. It was better than the alternative. 

I heard the double doors swing open and saw Cheryl coming down the lane with a large bowl in her hand. As she approached a faint buzzing began to grow in volume with every step. When she got to my table she set the bowl in front of me and pulled away the large cloth that had been covering it. The final dish was always served with a showman’s flourish. For what reason, I still do not know. 

“Oh my, don’t that look good!” Cheryl said, looking with genuine adoration at the writhing bowl of black hornets that she had just sat before me. 

They were packed in tight, dozens upon dozens of the foul creatures. They frantically crawled over one another, buzzing angrily as they skittered, but they didn’t leave the confines of the bowl. 

I sat immobile, staring at the dish. My finger tapped nervously on the table. 

“You know, you could have some if you want.” I said to Cheryl, who still loomed beside the table. She always stood and watched me eat.

“Oh that’s mighty kind, but I could never! That’s your dish, you’re the customer here, it’s just my job to take care of ya.” 

Figures. Cheryl loved all the food, but never wanted to eat it. 

“Go on now!” She said excitedly “It’s gonna get cold!”

“I’m working on it, just…just give me a God damn minute to appreciate my food, okay, Cheryl.” 

I whimpered at the lady. My voice cracking like only half a nut had dropped. Embarrassing, but who would blame me? She put her hands in one of those gestures of faux surrender. The kind you gave when you weren’t sorry for what you said, but sorry someone misinterpreted it. 

“My apologies, I just want ya to enjoy it, that’s all.”

Yea. Enjoy it. Okay Cheryl. 

Time was a-wastin’ and if there was one thing I was certain of, it was that sitting there staring at the bowl wouldn’t make it go away, so I took a deep breath and reached inside. My hand pulsed with the vibrations of the wings as I raised the ball of fearsome insects and plopped them into my mouth. I started to chew and the wasps began to sting. 

White hot pain filled my throat. While I chewed, the wasps not instantly ground up between my teeth angrily drove their stingers into my tongue. Some took flight in the small cavern of my mouth and flew down the back of my throat, choking me and piercing the soft walls of my esophagus with their stingers before sinking to acid death awaiting them in my stomach. My eyes watered. I reached into the bowl for another bite, some dropping out from the sides of my mouth when I couldn’t fit the whole handful over my now swollen tongue. Cheryl dutifully scooped these escapees away like the discarded peanut shells I had spent my childhood happily throwing on the floor. All the while watching my agony unfold in solemn silence. 

An unsavory grunting was emanating from my throat now. It hurt to chew, hell it hurt to even flex the muscles of my throat, but my gag reflex was on autopilot trying to free itself from the chitinous bits that clung to the back of my tongue like broken husks of popcorn. I tried to swallow my third mouthful of tiny demons and came up short. The wad of chewed bugs hung stuck in the back of my windpipe, refusing to go down. My throat was swelling shut. I retched, I coughed, I wheezed…I even wound up a fist and punched myself in the gut, trying anything to reclaim my open airway, but the multitude of stings were taking hold. With every second I felt the breaths I took grow more shallow. One hand clawed at my throat while the other frantically waved at Cheryl but I knew that wasn’t going to do any good. She just stood by, watching. Panic washed over me, followed by an intense wave of dizziness. I looked at her pleading one last time before smacking face first into my table and spilling the remaining wasps to the floor. 

Cheryl took her rag and wiped the bugs clean, then picked up the dish and headed back to the kitchen. 

I awoke with a start and found myself sitting in my booth, the menu already placed in front of me. Every time it always felt the same. Like you just came to from one of those dreams where you were falling and your whole body jolts to life, still carrying that imagined momentum. Cheryl has already made her way to me. That woman is not a time waster. 

“What’ll it be, hon?” She asks, pouring me a glass of water. 

“Just start me off at the top of the appetizers, Cheryl. We’ll work our way down.” I tell her, in the tired monotone voice that has become my norm. 

“I’ll go ahead and bring out the Ultimate Trio.” She says before starting to the back again.

“Let’s go ahead and bring the nachos too.” I call before she’s out of earshot. “Any way we can just get all of them out in one big pile?”

Cheryl gives it some thought for a moment then shrugs.

“Sure thing, baby, I don’t see why not.” 

Did you know that there are four fuckin nacho platters on the App menu? God forbid a motherfucker with a penchant for corn and decision paralysis ever darkens the door of the establishment. They say variety is the spice of life,  but they’re wrong. It’s a pain in my ass.

Now of course by this point I’m sure you all realize that this ain’t exactly your run of the mill Applebees. And for that matter, I’m not your run of the mill patron. I’m fuckin’ dead. Remember all that junk food? Turns out they gave you a big hint right there in the name. That shit just ain’t that good for ya, and I ate a lot of it. The new generation has a word for it. Stunt food I think they call it. Burgers stacked so high you can’t fit your jaw around em, or maybe a plate of fries coated in so many layers of meat and cheese that you can’t even see the damn spuds. That was my thing. If a restaurant had some type of gimmick entree, I wanted to try it. And try, I did. Often. Too often.

 Overall I stayed pretty active, I wasn’t even that big of a guy, but all that fat and cholesterol slowly built up on my insides. It sat hidden away, a silent killer choking out my arteries until one day, my heart just couldn’t keep up. Funnily enough, I had been out at the local park walking my dog when it happened. We got to the uphill portion and each footstep I took started to feel heavier than the last. I figured I was just really beat but when my breath began getting shallow I knew something wasn’t right. Another couple of steps and it felt like someone had tied a rope around my chest and yanked it taut. I was on the ground in seconds. Tater ran around me in frantic dashes barking, while I curled up beaten to submission by the waves of squeezing and stabbing pain shooting through my heart.

I heard some footsteps rushing up to me before I faded away, but they were too late. I closed my eyes on the world and woke up here…at Applebees.

Threw a goddamn fit the first day I was in. 

“Where am I?” 

“Where’s Tater?” 

“What’s going on?” 

Got the attention of Dick and Balls, who threw a pair of cursory glances my way from over at the bar. They paused the slow sipping on their cheap margaritas that always seem to be fuckin’ full even though there’s not a goddamn bartender in sight and stared holes into me. Wouldn’t speak a word though when I hit them with my spattering of questions. The silence exasperated me further and my voice got louder and louder till I was full blown shouting in the empty restaurant. Eventually my hollering mustered Cheryl from the kitchen, but by that point I was already heading for the door. She tried to call out to me but I wasn’t listening. 

I heard a faint. “I wouldn’t do that!” Before I slammed into that wooden door like a linebacker with 2.0 GPA that knew a scout was in the crowd

The wave of heat that hit me in the face was a shotgun blast. Point blank, straight to the skull. Beads of sweat pooled and evaporated before they could even run down my brow. As I flailed out the door and stumbled over my own feet, I could feel my lips dry and crack on my trip to the ground. I hit a patch of sidewalk and my skin sizzled. The first in a vast collection of injuries sustained at this God forsaken Applebees. I leapt to my feet and my eyes grew so wide I expected them to bulge out of their socket. I was standing on a 4×4 block of sidewalk, but a couple good steps away from me, the ground just flat out ended. The Applebees hung suspended over a gaping pit that burned with a fire the likes of which I had never seen. It made the horizon glow with a deep, hateful shade of orange and roared with such intensity that it sounded like I was trapped in a wind tunnel. Yet, over the roaring blaze there was something more. It wasn’t the roar of the flame I was hearing, it was screaming. As I looked on in fearful awe I could see them. Thousands upon thousands of bodies rolling, writhing, burning. Dripping flesh of magma sloughed off of them as they crawled upon one another, desperately pulling themselves forward, seeking any respite from the blaze. But with every forward motion of one, another slid further down. The process repeated ad infinitum. An ever ascending ladder of the damned, reaching for an impossible destination. 

I was standing at the precipice of hell.

“You might wanna come back inside.” A voice behind me broke me from the stupor and I felt a hand on my shoulder. 

“If you fall, that’s it, done is done.” Cheryl said, looking out over the pit with a sad gaze.

I didn’t need more convincing. I rejoined the waitress and took my spot at the booth that would indefinitely serve as my home. 

I was a bit more amiable to listen after witnessing the pit and Cheryl gave me a vague, yet simple explanation of my predicament.  I was dead as a doornail. A simple fact that was easy to accept after stepping out that doorway only to find myself at the brink of oblivion. Yep. I was dead alright, but that status of my eternal soul, that’s where things got confusing. 

Believe it or not, I was a pretty good fella before I kicked off to the afterlife. Sure I’ve got a bit of an attitude now, but you spend your endless days in a lonely Applebees overhanging eternal  hellfire and tell me just how sunny your disposition is. I met just about all the requirements to march my way to the pearly gates. I was a good husband, volunteered at an animal rehab facility, and still called my momma every weekend. Even went to church on a fairly regular basis and put my 10% in the plate every time. I would have been an easy case if it wasn’t for that damn stunt food. 

Gluttony is a deadly sin folks, and when you have to sign a waiver to eat a burger because it is so damn bad for you, well, that’s gluttony. I had lived a good enough life to keep me from the hellfire, but I couldn’t just waltz into the pearly gates. My consumption of all that was greasy bullshit was close to willful suicide. I had chosen to abuse my body and I had to repent for my lifestyle. So here I sat, not in a confessional booth but one meant to feed a family of four. 

Cheryl came out of the kitchen with one of those big platters in hand. She had opted to save time and just had them make my nacho arrangement on the serving tray instead of separate plates. 

“Here ya go, hon’ careful now that cheese is hot.” She said placing the mountain of corn chips in front of me. 

“Anything I can get ya?” 

“No, I’ll be good for a while, thanks Cheryl”  I replied, picking up a chip and starting in on the portion with the spinach dip. 

It only took a few bites before it hit me. By this point I knew it was coming, happened every time sure as clockwork, but that didn’t make it any more pleasant. The all too familiar wave of nausea that came from stuffing oneself a little too close to capacity rolled over me. I belched and felt the acid in my throat. A little bit of spinach dip sputtered out onto my chin. 

“Let me grab some extra napkins.” Cheryl said. 

She returned a moment later with a small pile of paper towels and passed them to me, then returned to her spot, dutifully watching me suffer. It was always like this. Once I started eating, I immediately felt like I couldn’t eat another bite, like there was no more room in my gut for more food. Yet I always did, and there always was. Acid reflux, nausea, fucking protein farts…for the rest of the meal I would be assailed by all of it, sitting right on the verge of vomiting. On the rare occasion I did, usually on purpose, just to buy myself a brief respite from the meal while Cheryl cleaned the table. 

I don’t know the inner workings of divine justice, but from what I could tell the gist of it was this: I had willfully put my body through the ringer with so much shitty food, that now I had to experience the worst of what it would do to my body, day in and day out. According to Cheryl, the goal was to make it through the menu. If I could finish my meal, I could leave. The problem with that was the damn final item. This accursed Applebee’s had a special item on the menu, one that I could only order after I finished everything else. It was always a secret, and it was always horrible.

The very first time Cheryl ever brought out my final meal, I thought repentance was going to be a piece of cake. Three blobby fish stared up at me from the plate as Cheryl presented it to me with a big smile. 

“Oooh they’re so fresh! It’s like we just plucked up out of the ocean.” She grinned, looking hungrily at the trio. 

I wasn’t the biggest fan of seafood, especially whole and raw, but I was sure I could manage. I started chowing down and thought it was going well, all things considered. Then halfway through fish number two, my fork clattered to the table. It had slipped out of my grasp as my arm went numb. I tried to pick it back up but found that I couldn’t move. A couple more minutes, and I couldn’t breathe. Turns out pufferfish are pretty damn poisonous. Tetrodotoxin it’s called. Even the fuckin’ name sounds heinous. Next thing I knew I was back in the booth, heart racing with that falling sensation, ready to start round two. 

The next ‘final’ meal wasn’t so subtle. I did a double take when Cheryl plopped down a shimmering plate of broken glass. I was in utter agony as the micro shards embedded themselves into my gums and scraped at the sensitive roots of my teeth. By the time I had swallowed half of it, my throat was tearing open at the seams. Died a couple minutes later from blood loss. Getting into heaven wasn’t going to be an easy task.

 I fought my hardest, I really did, but there’s only so much a man can take before he starts to lose hope. I could make it through the regular menu like clockwork, nausea be damned. But that final meal, the last hurdle to make it home free, was always too much. I had resigned myself to spending eternity in that booth, yet I kept eating.  I had to.  Nothing that happened to me in here could possibly be as bad as the pit awaiting outside, and if there was even a sliver of a chance that I made it through the final course…well. How far would you be willing to go for eternal bliss?  Sometimes Cheryl would be down for a moment of conversation, it was always a nice break from the monotony. She was business minded though, I could only keep her gabbing for so long before it was back on the saddle and time to eat again.

I polished off the last of the lava cake. What a sorry excuse for a dessert. I’m pretty sure we sold those frozen bricks of chocolate for our school fundraisers back in the day. Guess Applebee’s is a fan of fuckin’ education. No child left behind here. 

“All right Cheryl, I guess it’s about that time. Bring me my last supper.” 

She gave me a bit of a frown, but nodded all the same. I had a feeling she wasn’t super big on the religious humor. I steeled myself, mentally preparing for whatever horrors awaited. Cheryl was quick on her feet, a few moments passed and she was already bustling back through the door with a covered tray in hand. It was a big one today. 

My heart leapt in my chest when she pulled away the covering. It was a rattlesnake. I fuckin’ hated snakes. Had been terrified of them ever since I was a kid and Tommy Martin, the school shithead, had let a black snake loose behind me in the bathroom. I stood atop the toilet bawling my eyes out until the janitor heard and came to my rescue. That one had just been a baby, but the one sitting in front of me now was probably seven feet long.

I jumped in my seat when it rattled at me. I could see it following me with those glaring slitted eyes. Watching, waiting for me to reach out and touch it, to give it permission. Once I laid my hands on it, it would be free to fuck up my day and I could tell that it wanted nothing more. The rattle sounded again, shaking right to my bones. Cheryl clapped with glee.

“Well isn’t that fun! I love novelty desserts so much! Is today your birthday?” 

I wanted to slap that woman, but I was frozen in my seat. Out of all the horrible things I had faced, this was just too much. My hand trembled as I managed to lift it to the table. The rattler’s eyes following my every move. Its forked tongue flicked excitedly.

“Go on now” Cheryl said.

I couldn’t…

“It’s gonna get cold.” 

But I had to…

I reached closer, my hand about to make contact. I swear I could see the snake’s coils tense with anticipation. Right before brushing along the rough scales, I stopped short. In the throes of desperation, my panic ridden mind had produced a hail mary. An idea so simple, that surely it wouldn’t work.

“Cheryl…I can’t do it.” I said. “That last bit of lava cake filled me up.”

The snake let out another fierce rattle and I continued.

“It looks so good, but I’m just too full. I’ve already eaten so much…I should’ve…I should’ve quit a long time ago.”

Cheryl gave me a long look. 

“You know, my ma used to always say, ‘The meal’s only done when you’re full.’”

 A soft smile graced the edges of her lips. 

“I’ll go get you your check.” 

After all this time, after so many meals, I had bitched, moaned, vomited – hell I had died. But I had always kept on going. Never once had I taken a moment to just say, “No thank you.” Fueled by the desire to free myself, I was further trapped in a prison of my own making. Fucking idiot. 

I burst into a fit of laughter, a joyful, painful conglomerate of my pent up agony and my impending salvation flowed out of me in a fit of giggles. Earned myself the envied third look from Dick and Balls over at the bar. Cheryl came over with my receipt and I hugged the woman. She returned the embrace as I cried into her shoulder. 

“I really fuckin hate Applebee’s” I said through sobs and sniffles. 

She patted my back while I bawled. 

“I know, sweetie, let’s get you upstairs.”