Free Satan Burger by Iii Carlton Mellick Page B

insult back in the days before Man was created. 
    Sometimes you’ll hear someone call a friend a chum .  Whenever God hears this from Heaven, He starts laughing his ass off at the someone’s friend, who just smiles clueless of the insult.  One thing God does not like to be called is a c hum-chum.  Another is an idiot .  Another is wrong .  Telling God that He is wrong is probably the stupidest thing you can possibly do, because He is never wrong, and He’ll make your life wrong and your brain wrong and your face wrong just to make you regret putting the words God and wrong in the same sentence, unless the sentence is this: God is never wrong, he knows everything about everything. 
    Strangely, however, God finds being called a fuck-o or a fuck-face an amusing performance: after all, these are very fun words to say when you’re angry.  They launch off your tongue like fists.

    I go back to my skin to step out of the Gremlin autocar, preparing my wire muscles for a steep hike, rubbing them with needlelike fingers.  I replace some old Gremlin breath with the coldy-crisp air, fresh for the system, wakens me up for the premature morning.  It is still silent out, and the streets are still dead, not a living thing in the vicinity.  It doesn’t bother me right now.  The morning light is comforting.  It is a shame that most people miss this time of day.  Personally, I’d prefer to sleep through twilight than dawn.

    Satan Burger is not actually on the top of the hill.  It’s a little closer than halfway.  We get there pretty easily, although irritated by Vodka’s moan for German food instead of corporate death burger. 
    Near the door of the restaurant, a box holds a sign up that says, "Help NEEDED!"
    Behind the restaurant, there’s a small trail that continues up the steep hill, and near the opening of the trail there’s a table with a sign telling us, "Now approaching scorpion fly zone.  NO female baboons allowed!"

    Upon entering Satan Burger, the only customer we notice besides ourselves is a small troll that only speaks ancient druidic languages.  He sits in the corner and minds to himself, drinking a black cup of coffee and reading a collection of surfing anecdotes.
    A cigarette machine greets us in the entranceway.  It has two signs: "Come this way" and "Two Newports for the price of one!"
    The cigarette machine can’t speak, because it doesn’t own a voice box, but I can tell that it would be complaining if it could.  It doesn’t have any arms either, so there is no way that it wrote the signs all by itself.  Our job is to follow it, maybe decide whether or not the cigarettes are worth buying.
    The cigarette machine is our hostess because Satan wants to make it known right off that Satan Burger is a smoking restaurant.  It is divided into two sections: smoking and heavy smoking.  The machine also sells kaffa-bud cigarettes and dippy bob rocks, if you’re into that sort of thing.
    We follow the hostess, hobbling all fat-heavy on its tiny legs, toward the front counter, where a cash register winks and waits for our orders.  A crowd of tables and chairs watch us as we travel, staring, shifting, screeching across the tile.  The entire restaurant – it’s empty of all human employees, run entirely by living furniture.

    Satan appears behind the counter.
    He is shorter than me, looks middle-aged, with a gray beard and brown-gray hair, a queer smile stretches out his face, wearing a dark suit and red tie, and there’s a pin that says Gay Pride with a picture of a smiling penis that resembles a cartoon worm going into a butthole.
    Mortician sees the pin and hides behind Christian and Vod, whispering, "I told you.  I told you he’s gay."
    Mort is what Richard Stein would have called homophobic .  It’s a phobia usually caused by one of three things:

    1)         Being raised to believe homosexuals are socially unacceptable.
    2)         Not coming in contact with any