A Fistful of Fries

Stormiest week of the goddamn year, Thursday, Hank and Phil were in Phil’s Ford pickup, two greasy cheeseburgers on the dashboard and two helpings of fries to go along with it. Hank crammed a fistful of fries into his mouth and washed them down with a long pull from his foam cup of Dr Pepper. Phil studied him intently without reaching for his own food, same as he’d done their last few lunch breaks, ever since the rain began.

“Ain’t you goin’ to eat?” Hank asked, unwrapping his burger.

“Soon,” Phil said, watching him chew. 

Hank scarfed down half of his cheeseburger and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Phil’s glossy eyes never left him. They were round; mesmerized. They made Hank uncomfortable as shit.

“It’s gettin’ cold,” Hank told him. “Go on and eat.”

“Soon,” Phil said again.

“I ain’t seen you take a bite of your food since Monday. You just leave it up there on the dashboard and wait for me to go back inside. We’ve been havin’ lunch together for six years now and you ain’t never been shy about puttin’ away a burger or two. Are you sick?”

“No,” Phil answered blankly. “Not sick.”

“Then what the hell is goin’ on with you, Phil?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe you ought to figure it out, then. Talk to a doctor or someone just in case.”

“A doctor?”

“Yeah, a doctor. Jesus, man. You’re actin’ weird lately.”

“I will talk to a doctor.”

“Good,” Hank said. His cheeseburger called out to him but he felt too uneasy about eating it with Phil’s eyes draped all over him. He dropped the burger and the wrapper into the paper bag and he opened the truck door. “I’ll see you in there, I reckon.”

“See you,” Phil said and watched him go, a glimmer of fresh drool pooling in the corner of his mouth.

*****

The rain was coming down like a son of a bitch, but Hank wasn’t going to let that stop him, no sir. He was going to watch Phil take a bite of his cheeseburger if it was the last thing he ever did. Something had been up with him lately, something strange. It seemed to Hank that he was viewing things through different eyes somehow—infant eyes that were learning the way of the world for the first time. He wondered if Phil had had a small stroke and damaged his brain, or if he had some sort of cancer he wasn’t telling anyone about. He’d seemed out of it all week, like he never fully understood what was going on or how to perform even the simplest of tasks, like eating lunch or carrying on a conversation with his buddies at work. It confused Hank, but more than that, it worried him. He needed to make sure that his friend was okay. That concern is what led him to the backside of the parking lot dumpster, where he hid out of sight and peeked around the corner to watch Phil through the windshield of his truck.

“You know it’s raining out?” a voice asked behind him. It was John Little, coming to throw away his lunch garbage before heading back inside. Hank was so preoccupied with spying on Phil that he hadn’t heard him approaching. 

“I had no idea, John,” he said, a steady stream of rain dripping from the tip of his nose. “Thanks.”

“I do what I can,” John said, taking the steps two at a time and disappearing into the building.

Hank thought for sure that that idiot John had blown his cover. He waited quietly behind the dumpster for a couple of minutes before poking his head out again. Rain soaked through his clothes. His boots were supposed to be waterproof, and yet his socks were taking on water like a rowboat in the ocean. Still, he remained steadfast in his mission. When he finally peeked around the corner, he was relieved to see Phil still sitting in the driver’s seat. If he knew he was being watched, he didn’t let on.

The windshield wipers swished from one side to the other, working overtime to clear the rain for a fraction of a second. Hank could see that Phil was holding the little white bag of fries up to his face and inspecting them. He flipped the bag from side to side, studying the fries from all angles. When he was satisfied with how they looked, Phil grabbed a fistful of fries just as Hank had done earlier and pressed them against his closed mouth. He rubbed them slowly against his lips, round and round like salt-flavored ChapStick, then he stuck his tongue out just far enough to lick the salt from his lips. 

The wipers swished again and Hank saw Phil’s face light up. His mouth curled into a demented smile and his tongue slid once more through the crack like a snake through a crawl space door. He dragged his tongue up and down the fries in his fist, licking the salt and oily residue from each and every one of them. When he was finished, he shoved the fries into his mouth and gulped them down without chewing. His throat stretched and bulged as the food moved down his esophagus, but Phil was unfazed. 

Disgust bubbled in Hank’s stomach and his lunch turned rotten. He felt the sudden urge to drop to his knees and vomit, but he choked the hot bile down and kept his eyes on the truck. 

Phil was moving on to the cheeseburger and doing so rather eagerly. He tore the wrapper off like a kid opening his gifts from Santa and he slid his tongue across the cheese that was stuck to the paper. What bits of cheese he couldn’t lick off, he used his fingernails to scrape away. He shoved his fingers into his mouth and sucked each one of them clean, then he balled up the wrapper and shoved that into his mouth, too.

Hank couldn’t tear his eyes away for the complete state of shock he found himself in. What he was witnessing was unnatural and wrong, yet it was beyond his control whether he continued watching it or not. The heavy rain was no longer of consequence to him—he didn’t even notice it. Phil and his cheeseburger were the only things left in the world and Hank had no choice but to see it through to the soggy end.

He saw it all in snapshots between the wipers swishing back and forth: The lips parting, stretching so tight that the skin cracked and bled. The jaw expanding further than humanly possible until it hung loose like a door with a missing hinge. The tongue coiling itself around the cheeseburger and pulling it inside of a mouth that now resembled the entrance to a deep, dark cave. Hank didn’t even think of these body parts as Phil’s anymore. He didn’t think of the thing sitting in the truck as Phil at all. He didn’t know what it was and he hoped to God he’d never have to find out.

When the burger was finished sliding down the Phil-thing’s throat and its loose jaw retracted back into place, it pulled a napkin from the paper bag and dabbed at the blood on its lips, then it studied itself in the rearview mirror. Hank wondered what it was seeing, if it was starting to think of itself as Phil or if it could see its real face beneath the human skin. It stared for a long time—so long that Hank feared it had spotted him. He remained still, a shiver working its way up his cold, wet spine, until, at last, the Phil-thing let out with the loudest belch Hank had ever heard. It rattled the windshield and cut through the air like a great gust of wind. The force of it blew the dumpster lid open and Hank had to duck to avoid getting struck in the head. The dumpster hummed with its vibration and thunder shook the afternoon sky. 

“Get your ass in here, Hank!” John Little shouted from the building door. “The storm’s right over us! You too, Phil. Let’s go!”

Hank turned anxiously to the truck and saw that the driver’s seat was empty. The Phil-thing was now standing by the dumpster, lumbering over him with an all-knowing gleam in its eyes. 

“We better get inside, Hank,” it grinned with split lips as a dark shadow moved behind the storm clouds above. “This one’s going to be nasty.”