A grey morning, dew on every surface like a damp bun, your breath mists the air, the sky looks scoured raw, scraped and painful. There is no welcoming light from the windows or the neon signs. The Yumbo Man towers, black against the milk-coloured sky. You approach, your steps in time to the tune that won't leave you.
Yumbo, pick yourself off the ground
You don't need
To
Be
Un
Happ
Eeee...
The door swings open in a bare breeze. The glass is smashed, the Welcome sign in the door dim and hanging at an angle.
The restaurant is dark, dust blown in drifts against the counter and the seating, the windows dim with strata of cobwebs and grime. The light is murky, as if underwater. You touch the countertop and feel grit, paint flaking, sticking to you. Despite the cold you are drenched in sweat. You blink it out of your eyes, taste it on your lips. It tastes of processed cheese.
You look up at the menu boards, and realise that though they are covered by a thick layer of grime, they are still illuminated. But they don't list the usual items you would never deign to consider. They read, line by line:
This is not a place of honour $3.49
No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here $2.98
Nothing valued is here $6.59
What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. $9.69
message is a warning about danger. $4.50
More spots of moisture land by your hands on the counter. Blood, seeping through the dust. You touch your ears, your fingers come away wet, and you hear the music louder.
YUMBO, if you're in a new town...
You look up again and there is the cashier, smiling at you. You can't see their face. They say something to you but you only hear a crackling, wet sound, like chewing. They laugh, and it hurts behind your eyes, terribly, so terribly that you laugh too, until you double over with pain.
You come round with your cheek stuck to the filthy floor by blood and tears. It tastes, thick in your mouth, like special Yummy Yumbo sauce. You stand, dizzy, leaning heavily on the counter, and find the cashier is gone again, you are all alone again. Except.
Except for the Yumbo in its cheerful paper wrapping on the counter.
Unwrap it.
There it is, sweating bread and moist ham and clammy cheese, You can feel it perspiring into the paper, like it is a living thing, like it suffers as much as you do.
Lift the sandwich, breathe in the salt-wet-pink scent of damp ham and cheese, it will occur to you that you can't remember what a Yumbo tastes like. You know it is an experience so transcendent there is no turning back after the first bite, but the actual physical bite? You don't have a single memory of eating a Yumbo. In all this time, in all these pilgrimages, have you eaten? You must have, the Yumbos have vanished and you have been changed by them. But what did they taste like?
What did the sandwich taste like?
Tell me, now what the sandwich tastes like.