DID YOU ENJOY YOUR MEAL?
You are standing on the roof of the Yumbo King. You are standing in a high place from which there is no way down. You are standing at a point of no return. You are standing in the combination Yumbo King/ Precipice. You cannot see the horizon for mist, you cannot see the sun for the figure in front of you, blocking out all light.
DID YOU ENJOY YOUR MEAL?
You find a yellow paper wrapper in your hand. It is printed with grainy photographs of your own face, mouth open wide, too wide. More wrappers drift, blow at your feet. A breeze picks up and flings them all off the roof.
DID YOU ENJOY YOUR MEAL?
Your mouth is full of blood. It tastes of ham. The words shake through you, deafening, incomprehensible, the meaning only arriving afterward in your shocked and reeling mind, like the echo of an explosion, like the blast after a sonic boom, like fallout. You open your mouth to say you enjoyed your meal very much. The blood runs down your chin and drenches your shirt.
You hear metal creak, groan, and the towering figure before you turns slowly. You can see the pain involved in movement, the impossible way concrete and plaster and steel are torn out of shape and forced to bend like limbs, and you feel it in your own bones, you feel yourself pushed by a force inside your own skeleton to bow, to kneel, to prostrate yourself before The Yumbo Man. Your forehead is pressed to the grit and tar surface of the roof. Sweat stings your eyes. You hear him move like an avalanche held in abeyance, tower directly over you.
THANK YOU FOR CHOOSING YUMBO KING
The sound blasts you clean, pulps every soft part of you, you are meat and bone, you can taste yourself.
THIS WAS YOUR CHOICE
The truth of it hurts, it salts you like a wound bathed in brine, you are pink wet flesh cured in your own terrible choices.
Look up.
It hurts, but you can make your limbs move still, it is a crawling agony but you can bend your spine, lift your weeping eyes to gaze upon your god. It is blasphemy, but you will always choose blasphemy. You always chose the Yumbo. It tastes sweeter.
The Yumbo Man meets your gaze, his blank cartoon eyes and his cheese slice smile, the geometries of his face a map of the apocalypse, his pink ham flesh is weeping blood.
Salivate.
He reaches a huge hand down towards you. It is as big as a car, as big as the end of the work week, as big as work weeks that stretch through a whole life, as heavy. Reach up to take the hand.
The roof cracks under you. The groaning of metal gains voice, becomes a scream, a roar of concrete, the cracks spread under you, the solid roof becomes liquid, bowing under The Yumbo Man, you are pulled into the pit opening beneath him, and as you fall you are enfolded in his arms, this is your punishment and your release, this is what your crimes bought you and this is what you won with your blood and sweat, this is the taste of the Yumbo, and the world becomes dust and noise, everything is only dust and noise, and the noise screams
PLEASE TAKE A MOMENT TO FILL OUT THIS SURVEY ABOUT YOUR YUMBO EXPERIENCE