The following is an answer to Nico Harlakenden’s Stacktember prompt, “The Offering.” As always, thank you for reading.
The old man pulled his sputtering car up to the speaker, idling on a winding concrete path between a car wash and a Chase Bank. “Howdy,” he said and leaned out the window.
“Welcome to Wink’s, can I take your order?” The screen prompted a list of offerings, such as the Wink Burger, the Rocky & Bullwinkle promotional slushy drink, and fries.
The old man loosened the buttons on his short-sleeve mustard shirt he’d worn to church, and glanced at the throbbing black gauntlet in his passenger seat, buckled up and the size of a baby.
“I’ll order off the, uh. Secret menu.”
“Sorry, secret menu?” the voice was garbled. There were normal folk heard on the other end of the speaker, eating Wink Burgers inside. Normal, pretty folk. He tried to ignore the butterflies in his stomach, thinking of how normal they were, and how they might want to talk to him soon.
“Secret menu,” the old man was told to insist.
“We don’t have a secret menu, sir.”
He would need to ask three times, this the old man already knew. “Secret menu, and that’s with a please! Cherry on top,” he chirped. The gauntlet seemed to like that. “Can I get a tall Sand, from the deserts of Alphides?”
A pause, then: “Please drive to the next window. How will you be paying?”
The old man hadn’t thought of that. He looked to the gauntlet, and raised his eyebrows. He understood. “I’ll pay when I get there.”
The car rounded the bend, and the window opened up. An honest-looking woman in a polo shirt leaned out. Very normal. She looked concerned, a bit bewildered. “Secret menu? I’ve heard about this but never done this before. Are you sure—?” She saw the black gauntlet, shimmering in the passenger seat beside the old man. He’d broken into a sweat, by now. Anticipation. Sun. The act of gleaming.
“Sure, sure. God is by my side,” he insisted, at the risk of bragging.
“Ooo-kay,” the woman shrugged, and came back with an extra-large soda cup (the Rocky & Bullwinkle one), evidently bearing a large scoop from an ashtray. It was full of black-white fluff and cigarette butts.
“Oh, splendid. Splendid, splendid. Thank you—”
“—Careful, it’s hot—” the woman warned.
“—madam.” The old man took the cup in one hand, gently kissed the woman’s hand in the other. Tasted normal and pretty. She pulled her hand back, as he protested he was just being a gentleman. He’d gotten caught up in the moment, what with the gauntlet, and all. His face burnt. He gleamed with sweat— anticipation. Sun. The ash made the car oppressive as the deserts of Alphides, in the season of ventergloom. The old man had never left Alberquerque, but he trusted the gauntlet.
Lest he stroke out like some dog in a car, the old man slammed on the gas and skid his ride into the Chase Bank parking lot. He dashed out the sweltering car to his knees, casting a fist deep into the soda cup of spent ash.
He winced, allowing the delicate worms to do their work upon his flesh. They began the chewing with a promptness only found by hunger, so fast the skin was gone without pain. The old man felt the soft grit against his raw pink hand, but the pain too was gone, the worms having deeper descended into the hand.
The capillaries, the nails, the musculature and the tendon all dissolved, without a protest, and the old man watched the clouds roll by. His arm kept still, because he was not impulsive. An impulsive man never becomes an old person, in the deserts fields of Alphides. He took his hand out of the sand, finally. It was time. The worms fell from his bones, having left those, mercifully.
Each of the little white beasties were as thin as a hair, and reminded the old man of rice noodles. They shriveled in the open air, a grace that had protected the stump of his wrist from the spreading hunger of the things crawling in the ground. He was left with his bony hand. Bringing it out of the cup, he unbuckled the gauntlet with his one fleshy hand. He tried it on, sliding bone into thin grooves.
"There," he smiled a toothless grin. "It fits like a glove."
The gauntlet would fit upon no living man's form, but the skeletal hand, calcified and smoothed into marble by the ashtray worms, slid into the grooves of black iron. He was heading back to Wink’s, and then back into church full of normal, pretty people.
Mr Bagenski, I do hope that one day you’ll permit me read your natal chart for the purpose of learning the condition of your Mercury—and the nature of the mind that developed this deliciously foul fever-dream.
I dropped my jaw at the old man’s giddy tone, delightful!