Nan starts crying for Gin again. This just isn’t his day. First, he gets killed. Then he turns into a zombie. Now his hand is a separate-minded creature that is eating his only sandwich.
“Yeah, but Gin is dead,” Christian argues. “He’s one giant inanimate object.”
“Well,” Satan says, “how come his hand turned alive instead of his whole body? Wouldn’t my touch just resurrect him?”
“How should I know?” Christian yells. “I don’t know anything about dead people. Shouldn’t you know? You’re the Lord of the Dead.”
“I’m not the Lord of the Dead,” Satan disputes. “I’m the Lord of Darkness. The Darkness and the Dead are two completely different things. I know more about life than death.”
“Well, you know more about death than I do,” Christian says. “You’ve probably met all sorts of dead people in your line of work.”
“Yes,” Satan says, “but my job is to damn them to hell, not drink tea with them and discuss what their lives are like now that they’re dead.”
“Whatever,” Christian says, and a salt shaker agrees by hopping up and down splashing salt all over the counter.
Nan calms Gin eventually. She tells him that it’s not all that bad. Someday the hand will learn how to be a hand again. He’ll just have to adjust, and he’s got all of eternity to do that, even if his soul gets sucked away.
She says, “Life is funny that way.”
Gin names his hand Breakfast. It’s the first word that poops into his brain. That’s the way Gin names everything. He doesn’t care if it is a bad name. Names are just names, he says. His dog was named Cancer. His car was named Forward. His goldfish were named Socks, Aluminum, Bookshelf, and Paper Cut. The first choice for everything is always the right one. That’s what he says about buying things, that’s how he answered test questions in school, that’s how he watches television.
His father was like that too. “First choice is best,” his father would say. The father was drinking gin when Gin was born. He was drinking vodka when Vodka was born. They also had an older sister, who moved to Colorado and married a man twice her age. Gin’s father was drinking whiskey when she was born. If he outlives any of his children, Gin’s father plans on drinking a fifth of the appropriate liquor in honor of his lost child, right on the grave, mourning drunk, alone with the corpse. Of course, that will never happen now.
Breakfast is back to normal color again, unlike the rest of Gin’s flesh. Eventually, Gin’s entire self will be rotten, white and shriveled and crusty. His eyes might roll into the back of his head. All the skin might peel away. Maybe he will become a living skeleton that can’t do anything but sit there. Only the hand will be fresh.
Gin ties his hand up for the time being, and puts it behind his back to keep it from his mind. He’s still agitated by the whole situation, feeling worse about his hand being alive than the fact that he is dead. Nan gives him her sandwich, even though he doesn’t need to eat anymore, and he eats in silence.
Satan’s sandwich is alive and screaming as he eats it. If I had emotion enough to cry for the poor thing, I would. It never had a chance. The sandwich’s guts — pickles, tomatoes, and onions — squeeze-spray all over the counter. Then it bleeds mustard and mayonnaise until it goes into shock and faints.
Gin feeds Breakfast some of his sandwich. Its mouth is where Gin’s lifeline used to be. The mouth is thin and it doesn’t contain any teeth yet. Its stomach and lungs have formed beneath the skin of the palm. The digestion track ends at the base of the wrist, where the sandwich will exit once the time comes. The hand doesn’t have any eyes, but uses its fingers like antennas which have an extremely keen sense of touch.
Breakfast picks apart the sandwich, using its feelers and mouth. It doesn’t like the bread. Hands mostly like meat and onions. Boiled onions in beef gravy is a very popular meal for hands.
After eating is over with, the room goes tired.
The long night has hit everyone really hard. Mortician is asleep on a bench, which is also asleep, his pirate hat rests on his head. Earlier in the night, Satan had touched the pirate hat. Satan doesn’t think before he makes things alive, and it’s quite normal for him to have all objects surrounding him alive. But it’s not normal for him to use caution around inanimate objects, so inanimate objects who don’t want to be animate must learn to avoid his touch. Now the pirate hat is alive and sleeping on Mort’s head.
Satan’s hobby is creating new demons. Sometimes he will get some modeling clay and sculpt a large monster with horns and wings and sharp teeth. Its appearance is meant to be scary. Once he touches them, they turn into demons and spend most of their time scaring people. This is how humans believed demons looked, but they were mistaken. Only few demons were made in this style. All of them are dead now. The majority of demons are pieces of furniture or doors or tools.
The demons in Satan Burger are all sleeping on their backs, or stirring quietly in the kitchen. The draining feeling of an endless night seeping into a stale morning has gotten into us all. Even the furniture-demons need rest.
Gin, Nan, and Vodka have left for home. They used a teleportation device — a satanic device — to travel back to the warehouse. The device looks similar to a piece of candy corn. When you touch the yellow butt, a door shoots out of the white tip. And you can go anywhere you want through that door, if you program it right. Satan has programmed the door so that all of us can get between the warehouse and the restaurant with no trouble or time wasted.
Vodka found the teleporting door very interesting, but nobody else seemed to care. Doors are doors, no matter how unusual or magical they might seem. Everyone else said, “That’s a very convenient door,” but nothing else. The door looks even more bizarre than the candy corn remote for it. It’s made of energy, orange colors that swirl all around, which is why Vod likes it. He’s into bizarre-looking things. He’s a bizarre-looking thing himself.
Gin, Nan, and Vodka went to sleep. Their shift is in the morning and they’ll have to work all day collecting souls from unsuspecting customers. Mort, Christian, and I have the later shift, so it’s not necessary for us to go to sleep right away. My body is getting awfully tired, though, so I let it sleep. But my vision stays awake, soaring into the air above, hovering over Satan and Christian. Neither one of them have tired. Christian doesn’t wear down easily, going for days at a time without sleep. He has started on another bottle of gold liqueur, soon to be gritty-mad drunk. This brand is called Gold Rush, the second best brand you can buy. Fool’s Gold is piss compared to Gold Rush.
Christian and Satan are drinking and smoking with each other’s company. Satan is drinking a beer from a living bottle — the bottle’s beer is its blood, so Satan is bleeding it to death — but the bottle can’t complain. Satan is its master, after all.
Satan gets to talking about where he came from. First, he first mentions his father, Yahweh, who is God.
Yahweh’s main job is to create things. It is the job that all gods are paid to do. There is a god inside every living star. Within our sun, there is Yahweh. He is not in our dimension, however. If God was in our dimension, the sun’s fire stomach would burn Him up.
Inside of the god dimension, a sun looks like a shopping mall, where the temperature is always perfect, and there are plenty of benches to sit on near fountains and plants. Some people call this shopping mall Heaven.