There, on the precipice of town, they cook their meats. It’s low-and-slow full-bodied pigs split on a spike, blistered and crackling in big drums filled with coal and hellfire. Black grates furred with ash hold wrist-thick sausages over a licking flame. Wedges of white onion and tomatoes line giant aluminum pans, open to the coterie of flies buzzing in heat-addled loops, next to behemoth tubs of viscous sauce.

 

Behind the rickety tables and benches is a truck—square as a breadbox, the bright red dulled by leopard-print water spots. The truck holds up the wooden menu crookedly, inked with meats and prices. Windows dark, the truck, with its sunken balding wheels, glints an arrow of light into your eye as you drive past, but beyond that, it is inert. A boulder. A geological phenomenon that long ago ruptured the crust of the earth with a savagery that is glacial in time but relentless, inexorable in being exactly where it should not be.

 

The men who work the grill and smokers, the men chopping—the endless thwack of cleaver against board—do not enter the truck. They are outside creatures in black pants and canvas aprons stained rose-pink. Cigarettes dangle under coarse mustaches, phlegm seesaws through their systems in alternating snorts and hawks of spit. Nails rimmed dark with the effluvia of kitchen work—these men would not pass a health inspection. They are unbothered by food-borne pathogens or bits of bone in a bite. They sweat in the warping convection of sun reflecting off asphalt and serve delectable heaps of meat.

 

People drive past on their way home, noticing the pennant of smoke shimmering in the evening sky. The cookout scent streams into the car like an old-timey cartoon smell in the shape of a hand to tempt them.

 

People U-turn and park nearby. They’ve worked all week, paid rent, and, yes, there is food at home, but maybe the best meal of their life is here—in the parking lot of an almost-defunct strip mall, sitting on a bench made crooked by cracked concrete, using bone-white plastic cutlery to saw at meat on grease-limned Styrofoam plates. People sit next to each other, smug in their perspicacity at spotting a food gem amongst the craquelured boards of abandoned buildings and dust-rilled faux adobe.

 

Nobody leaves, plates are refilled, and as cold beers are cracked open, people talk loudly, vivacious and unconcerned about beer-foamed upper lips and sticky, sauce-splattered clothes.

 

It’s a girl, usually a girl, though not always, who feels queasy by the food, pushing it over to a brother or cousin, whoever was driving and decided to pull over. She is on the precipice of womanhood, often smarter than most people, but shy, and lonely. This girl, who is never like the others, contemplates the food truck. 

 

On the truck dash, a hula girl, a nut-brown, pink, and green spot of brightness at the bottom of the sheer black windshield. She swirls her hips left, then right, a sensuous undulation.

 

How? There’s no wind nor vibrations of engine or road to move her.

 

The girl blinks hard. It’s not a hula girl, it’s Santa Muerte. Mother Death. Her skull face covered by a cowl of black, adorned with blood-red roses, and her upraised skeletal hand bends at the wrist, slowly, a finger extending to point at the girl.

 

The girl reels back, turns to her companions for assurance, but everybody at the table is guffawing, hysterical mouths gaping, and stuffed with pulpy meat. They pound the table with their fists to punctuate hilarity with violence.

 

The girl scrambles to stand. Panicked, she turns only to see that the cooks and servers have also transformed.

 

Some retain the human ratio of limbs, but others have sprouted thrashing tails or coiling, flexing tentacles. Horns sprout from foreheads to curl and twist in massive rust-colored adornments of head and shoulder. All around, she is surrounded by a menagerie of oil-black eyes, lolling prehensile tongues, scabbed and scaled bodies.

 

Worst of all, the diners keep eating, laughing, choking, spittle-drenched with crazed merriment, oblivious to the nature of the creatures that serve them.

 

No—no. The worst is the food. For now, she recognizes the meat stacked for the grinder: long bones of the thigh, the human fingers, the gristled scapulas, and scalps ready to be ground down and stuffed into white, membranous casings.

 

The girl staggers away, falls to her knees, and in the dirt, retches up chunks and bile.

 

She feels them watching her. Not the diners—they are trapped in some fever dream of eating—but the creatures.

 

Strong hands grip the girl under her armpits, urging her to stand and draw further away from the street-light spotlight of the cookout.

 

It’s an older woman, unkempt and sour-smelling. The sort of woman your eyes gloss past as she pushes a purloined grocery cart stuffed full of plastic bags, tinctures, and wards, along the side of the road, stopping to hiss and shout at empty air.

 

The woman’s gentle hand over the girl’s mouth stops the scream.

 

“I see them, too,” she says, her arms keeping the girl upright.

 

“Who … what?” the girl tries to fathom.

 

“They have many names and take many forms. You’ll learn them all, soon enough, baby girl. You’re one of us now.”

 

The girl whimpers, terrified.

 

“Be cool,” the woman says. “We can’t fight them tonight. They’ll harvest what they want and move on, soon.” 

 

The food truck engine roars to life, a violent tectonic rumble.

 

The older woman picks up speed, the two of them stumbling backward blindly, unwilling to look away from the assembly of seething eyes.

 

“We retreat to fight another day!” the woman explains, and finally spins them to face the twilight, grabbing the girl’s hand so that they will not lose each other as they run into the rising darkness, towards an underpass or culvert, anywhere others like them can safely gather, while behind them, the diners keep laughing, the creatures keep serving, and the food truck engine revs and revs.

​

Reneé Bibby (she/her) is a writer based in Tucson, Arizona. She teaches at The Writers Studio and reads for Brink. Her work has appeared in Fractured Lit, Luna Station Quarterly, and Taco Bell Quarterly. Reneé coordinates a yearly Rejection Competition for writers—all writers, all levels welcome! More at reneebibby.com.