Pure shit 2

She worked at Burger King and he, stumbling in from the rain and wiping the moisture from his eyes, clearing his vision and seeing her pale oval face set against a backdrop of grease and disinfectant, had decided that she didn't belong there. She had smiled her mandatory customer-service smile at him and he had taken it as a symbol of her innocence. He smiled back at her paternally, and not without the paternal fear that she might be corrupted.
	“Can I take your order, Sir?”
	She was sheltered here, in her Plexiglass prison, he assured himself as he returned the smile. He enjoyed the perverse frisson that this thought brought to him. He spoke his order. It came out as an involuntary and barely decipherable croak to his embarrassment.. His neck muscles, in anxiety, would often cramp up without him noticing. Only when the words tried to push through out of the throat would he notice the resistance, and a strange, almost imperceptible click in his gullet would alert him that now was not the time to attempt speech. To think that he had allowed her to witness his impotence made him feel sick. He imagined punching himself in the gullet as he slid the cash over the counter, afraid as he was of contact, and stepped aside dejectedly as the next customer sidled up to the faux-marble counter top. That was what he was: a customer. An immigrant shouted out his order in a harsh, guttural accent and he retreated with his tray.
	Concentrating was becoming increasingly difficult lately, he noticed. His cardboard cup had overflowed and was spilling onto his hand. This is why he chose diet soft-drinks. He knew that they weren't any better for him, but the zero-sugar content meant that if he were to spill his drink, (and he often spilled his drink, sometimes without even noticing in the cloudy state of consciousness he had unconsciously cultivated through a sleep pattern that was less generous that he consciously even realised, as well as the neglect of medication he sorely needed for a mild neurological condition he didn't know he had), his hands would not get sticky from the splash. It was only in that one moment of lucidity, in the glow of her face, that he realised how long his head had been clouded. How, for most of his life, he had only experienced life through muddied stimuli. It maddened him now, the dullness of his senses. He resisted the temptation to slam his head against the carbonated drinks dispenser and went instead to sit in his car.

	He sat, reclined at a 15º angle in his leather seat with the paper packing of his meal splayed on his lap. The fries sat on the dashboard and, in the passenger seat, the brown bag had been crumpled into a bowl-shape and was acting as a ketchup cipher. He took turns alternately dipping and biting the burger and the chicken pieces. He wanted not just a mechanical recognition of taste, which he now realised was all he was accustomed to, but a corporeal realisation of the taste to flood the body. He wanted to bite into it and release the involuntary semi-orgasmic moan like the women in the commercials did, but the more he resolved to extract this feeling the number he felt, and the more the food just felt like soft homogeneous meat going into his mouth that would enter his digestive system and deposit scraps that would sit in various places within his gastrointestinal tract for several weeks before being flushed out.
	He lit a Marlboro Menthol cigarette and awarded himself several more notches on the seat's recliner before unwinding his car's window. He sucked hard on the cigarette and blew out the smoke voluptuously, at an angle, so the majority of it would exit the car through the now open window, registering the nicotine's release of dopamine and noting a vague dizziness which he attributed to his long abstinence from tobacco. He had never been much of a smoker, nor did he usually eat fast food, but a recent change in circumstances had made this indulgence somehow a necessary part of the process. Until recently denied these indulgences, which he did not in any case desire, he was taking to them in an act of rebellion against the now absent Denier. The Denier had prohibited the use of these indulgences on the basis that they were harmful to him, and now, despite his lack of desire for them, he would partake in these indulgences not only as an act of rebellion, but a very deliberate demonstration of his lack of interest in self-preservation.



	Twenty minutes later Keith had unbuttoned his trousers and had given in to the full recline of his car-seat. A faint ketchup-tang smell emanated from the strewn Burger King packaging on the floor of the car and mixed with the burnt mint in the car's ashtray. Keith exhaled.