I was nodding off when my Lit teacher told everyone in our class to pair up. At the sound of scampering feet and chairs scraping the linoleum floor, I snapped awake, straightened myself up, and looked around. The others had chosen their partners. And not one of them thought to approach me.

“Jejomar, looks like you’ll have to pair up with Alberto,” said the teacher.

My stomach curled when I spotted a lumpy shadow in the far corner at the back of the classroom looking like a sad sack of potatoes.

Berto the Weirdo.

That was the unfortunate name my peers had tacked on to him. And they weren’t exactly wrong. Berto was a strange 17-year-old boy. He’d say the most peculiar, sometimes outlandish, statements. One of them caused a ruckus at school the previous month, and it nearly got him expelled.

He had cut off our history teacher mid-lecture and blurted out that Abraham Lincoln, 16th US president, was going to rise from the dead and invade the school along with his dead army of Union soldiers. And he advised that we should heed his warning carefully. There was going to be an invasion.

The class fell dead silent. We all gawked at him. He couldn’t be serious, we all thought. But he didn’t blink, his dry lips didn’t crack a smile. Berto was serious. After a moment of suspense, someone burst into laughter. Then, one by one, the others joined in.

“Lincoln wasn’t even buried in this state!” the history teacher cried through his laughter.

They didn’t see how Berto’s eyes narrowed, how his ears burned red, and how he ground his teeth and muttered under his breath, “You’ll see soon enough.”

The following day he swaggered into school dressed up like a gunslinger with a Winchester rifle slung over his shoulder and a set of daggers underneath his long leather coat. But Abraham Lincoln and his dead army of Union soldiers didn’t rise from their graves and invade the school. The rifle was fake, though that couldn’t keep him out of trouble. The school was put on lockdown and everyone else scattered to the closest rooms they could find and locked themselves in, until the cops arrived.

After that went on, somehow Berto was allowed to stay at the school. Some said it was because his dad, a rich businessman of an obscure trade, wrote the School Board a fat check. Money talks, as they say.

Now, Berto the Weirdo was going to be my partner for a stupid class assignment.

“Um...” I uttered as I shot my hand up in the air.

The teacher turned from the chalkboard and raised a brow. “Yes?”

“Can I work alone?”

“No.”

“But—”

“I think I’ve told you to pair up with Alberto!”

“Fucking hell,” I grumbled.

“What did you say?”

“Nothing!”

I braced myself. I needed every ounce of the universe’s mystical powers to get me through this hour-long ordeal.

Seeing that the lumpy sack of potatoes wasn’t going to move where I was, I picked up my notebook and textbook, and plopped into the empty desk beside him. Berto didn’t have his textbook, not even a pencil or a notebook. I knew right then I’d be carrying the weight of the assignment for both of us. And I’d completely forgotten what story we were reading in class.

“Hey, do you even know which chapter we’re supposed to be reading?” I asked him, but he didn’t respond, not even a glance over in my direction. He was busy biting the skin around his thumb and staring at the bloody progress he’d made chewing it off.

I waved my hand in front of his face. He slowly turned. His gaze crept along my skin. I shuddered. An unsettling presence lurked behind those brown eyes. I couldn’t put a finger on what exactly it was, but it frightened me.

“I can’t hear with my right ear,” he said, flatly. “You’ve got to be on my left side.”

Grumbling, I lifted the desk slightly off the floor and scooted over to his left side, wedging myself between him and another student, who threw me a nasty look for bumping into her leg and letting one of the legs of the desk stomp on her backpack on the floor. But after I had settled down to flip open my textbook, a sudden gust of wind came out from nowhere and leafed through the pages. I watched in confused shock until it landed on a page with a picture of the Devil. Flashing his pearly whites, he seemed to stare at me from the page, with barely concealed malice. It was a chapter on the portrayals of the Devil in classic literature with excerpts from Milton’s Paradise Lost, Goethe’s Faust, and Dante’s Inferno.

I scooted my desk closer to Berto and laid the book between us. He glanced at the picture and giggled. With his face turned away from me, he was whispering to someone else, though there was no one on the other side of him.

I tapped him on the shoulder.

Slowly, he turned to face me. “Yeah, what?”

“We need to get started on the assignment.”

I still didn’t know what exactly we were supposed to do. I squinted at the chalkboard trying to make out the chalky scribbles. I needed to focus but Berto’s giggling was distracting.

“What are you laughing about?” I snapped.

Grinning, he shrugged. “It’s nothing.”

“If it’s so funny, then I want to know.”

He stroked the sparse hairs on his chin and pondered for a moment. And then, he leaned over and, tapping a finger on the Devil’s picture, he whispered, “Mr. Friendly thinks he’s much more handsome than this coxcomb here,” slapping a hand over his mouth to hide his snickering, “but I told him that all goats look the same anyway.”

“Who the hell is Mr. Friendly?”

I thought perhaps he had a Bluetooth piece in his ear and was chatting with someone on the phone. But then he pointed to his right ear. The ear with which he claimed he couldn’t hear well.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“He lives right here,” he said, rubbing his ear. “I think that’s why I can’t hear with this ear; Mr. Friendly takes up all the space inside and—damn—he sure is a loud talker.”

I didn’t know how to respond, honestly. I scanned the room hoping that maybe—just maybe—there was another classmate without a partner. The students, however, were all perfectly paired up, and by the look on their faces, they were glad to not have ended up with Berto. Some threw a pitiful glance at me.

Berto frowned. “You don’t believe me, I know.”

Of course not! Why would anyone believe anything he said? This was the same guy who was convinced that the tomato sauce in the school’s cheese pizza was made with the blood of aborted fetuses. That rumor spread faster than wildfire ripping through a dry-ass Arizona field on a summer’s day. It riled up some folks. They stormed the cafeteria and screamed at the workers. A vicious brawl broke out, and it ended with the head lunch lady being sent to the hospital with a spork in her eye, but no arrests were made.

“Don’t you know what you’re saying?” I asked him. “I mean it’s...” I paused to search for the right word without setting him off. “It’s...just—I mean, it’s just so bizarre!”

He glowered.

“Besides,” I went on, “it’s probably earwax that’s clogging your ear canal.”

He rummaged through his backpack and pulled out a small flashlight. “See for yourself,” he said, handing me the flashlight. I balked but he egged me on. “Come on, look!”

He twisted his body around, so that I could peer into his right ear with the light. Aside from the white flakes sprinkled about in the outer part, his ear canal was deep and pitch-black, meaning that there was nothing there.

As I was about to tell him how much he was full of shit and that I was quite sure it was a thick wad of earwax sitting deep in the canal, when I thought I heard—no, no, couldn’t be—but there it was again...a distinctive, clear and crisp, voice saying, “Salutations Jejomar,” and then the squeaking hinges of a door being shut closed.

A loud smack rang in the air. I jumped. The teacher had slapped a long ruler against the chalkboard, and it had broken in half.

“Jejomar! Alberto! This isn’t playtime!” she shrilled, glaring at me and Berto. “Get back to work!”

I shoved the flashlight back into his hands and attempted to read a passage, but I couldn’t focus. The words on the page blended into one inky whirlpool. My mind wandered back to Berto’s right ear, and it made me remember the time when my dad took my little sister to a healer.

After she had complained about mind-numbing headaches, my parents drove my sister to the doctor who conducted several tests and yet found nothing wrong. Healthy as an ox, he told them. But then she started bleeding from her eyes and nose. My dad carried her to the healer who lived in an old apartment complex down the block.

The healer was an elderly man who we called Papay. My dad laid my sister down on the couch. Papay grabbed an egg from the kitchen and rubbed my sister’s head with it, while mumbling a prayer under his breath. At that time, I thought ‘oh, boy, here we go. We were going to get swindled out of a hundred bucks.’

Those thoughts, however, were erased when Papay cracked the egg into a bowl and, instead of the clear egg white with the yolk at its center, it was deep brown spotted with white fuzzy spores. He told dad that my sister had a malicious spirit inside of her. He called it a demònio. To extract the demònio, Papay concocted a special drink. He stirred hot water in a mug with calamansi, a root, and a white powder.

My sister’s face scrunched up. The taste was too sour and too bitter, but she did what she was told and drank every drop. Then, the mug slipped from her hands. Her head whipped back, and she let out a terrible gut-wrenching scream as a tiny wrinkly hairless pink creature with the face of a red-eyed rat crawled out of her nostril. The demònio made for the door, but Papay, who was as swift as a hawk, caught it with his left foot, pinching it between his big toe and pointer toe. With a quick snap, he popped its head like a fat red pimple squirting out a gush of yellow pus.

My stomach churned just thinking about it. But then, an idea sprung up.

“I’ll believe you,” I said to Berto, “if you do a simple test.”

Intrigued, Berto raised a brow. “A test?”

“Yes, it’s a test to see if you’re telling the truth.” “Alright, test me, then!”

I dug through my bag and retrieved an egg from a small Tupperware. It was a hard-boiled egg, but I thought it would do the trick the same as Papay’s.

“Rub your right ear with this and if the egg turns black and moldy inside,” I explained, “then that means Mr. Friendly is there, and if it’s white—”

Berto snatched the egg from my hand before I could finish. He rubbed it on his right ear in circles and handed it back to me, looking on expectantly. As I peeled off the shell, a revolting odor dominated the classroom without mercy. It ripped through my nostrils and watered my eyes. It was as if I had stepped into a public restroom where the smell of urine and excrement thickened the moist air.

“No eating in class!” the teacher screamed. She pointed to a poster of classroom rules on the wall. “Put that aw—” she stopped abruptly, her face turning green. Slapping a hand over her mouth, she bolted out of the classroom.

The other students were retching. They knocked over the desks and chairs as they scrambled for the door. Some went straight to the windows and flung them open. I also rushed to the windowsill and gasped for air. When I swerved around, sliding to the floor completely winded, I watched Berto pick up the rotten egg off the floor, sniff it, and gobble it up. There was no doubt in my mind that a demònio was living in Berto’s ear. And judging by the stink the egg exuded, it was an incredibly malevolent one. Now, I realized, perhaps it was the reason why he’d say and do things that were so...unhinged.

“All right, I believe you,” I said, settling back into my desk.

Glaring at Berto, the other students returned to their seats and whispered among themselves. And with the teacher being absent, a few took the opportunity to ditch the class.

Berto’s eyes lit up. “Oh, do you now?”

“Yes, sure.” I nodded. “But don’t you think that Mr. Friendly isn’t so—well—very friendly?”

Again, he stroked the hairs on his chin and thought hard. “He’s been annoying me lately. He never shuts up. Sometimes he wants me to do things. I mean, sometimes they’re fun things. Like the time when we snuck into the principal’s house and brought his cat home with us.”

He chuckled fondly at the memory.

My eyes widened. “That was you!” I had heard about the principal’s missing cat and had seen the ‘lost cat’ posters around the school. “What happened to it? What did you do with it?”

He sighed. “Mr. Friendly got hungry.” “Fuck, Berto!”

“But he crossed the line when he wanted my dog!”

“So, do you want to give Mr. Friendly an eviction notice, then?”

He nodded with a mournful look. “You don’t understand how this is driving me close to the breaking point!” He yanked at his hair. “I need help. Can you help me?”

“Why would I help you?”

“Because you’re my partner in this class.”

Well, not by choice. But I kept my mouth shut.

“And you’re the type,” he continued, “to help a fellow man, no matter who it is, whether he be a bum on the streets or not. You have a good sense of morals; you know what is right and wrong.”

“How can I help, though?”

Berto’s eyes twinkled with a glimmer of hope that I might finally offer him the relief that he so desperately craved. And though Berto and I weren’t the best of friends, I was willing to save another fellow human being.

“I’ve tried to pick him out with a pair of tweezers,” he said, “but it was too difficult. There’s something in the way. And I was a little scared to continue; I thought I might accidentally puncture my eardrum.”

“You want me to try to pick your ear?”

He rifled through his pockets and took out the slender tweezers. “Yes,” he affirmed, handing me the tool and the flashlight.

I grimaced.

Normally, if anyone were to ask me to clean their ears, I’d downright turn them down. But this was different. This was another human being who was suffering. He had a demònio in his ear, and he needed help. My help. So, peering into his ear with the flashlight, I inserted the tweezers, going deep, until it bumped into something hard. I poked at it a couple of times.

“Ah, ah!” Berto cried. “Does it hurt?”

“No, it’s just loud. Like you’re banging on a door inside my ear.” “Hold on. I think I’ve got it.”

I squeezed the tweezers on something, and after a few tugs, something gave way, and I withdrew from what appeared to be a door made from amber-colored wax with its hinges and door knob of a hardened blackish crust.

“Ah, wonderful!” Berto whooped. “I can hear clearly now!”

I flicked the wax chunk away and shined the light into the ear canal. “Do you see him?” he asked.

“No, I don’t.”

He laid his head on his desk with his right side facing up. “Look a little closer.”

I upped the brightness on the flashlight and, drawing myself closer to his ear, I squinted. A gust of hot wind whipped about me, lifting notebooks, textbooks, pencils, and papers up into the air in circles. Every second the wind grew stronger, hotter.

Covering my head with my arms, I ducked under a desk, and when the storm had calmed, I opened my eyes and found myself in a scorching tunnel. At one end was a bright light, while on the other end was the pitch-black abyss. I tried to turn on the flashlight, smacking it against the wall, but it only lasted a fleeting moment before flickering away and dying.

I had this unshakable feeling that something was watching me from the darkness. Then a voice called out to me. Every nerve in my body screamed at me to run. Something was coming. Closer and closer. I made a mad dash towards the light end of the tunnel. And as I ran to the light, the ground began to shake, throwing me off my feet. And a great amber wall of wax materialized before me, completely blocking the light and sealing me in the darkness.

I wanted to scream but the torrid air burned my throat and lungs. My eyes wilted and crumbled like crushed autumn leaves. My mouth dried up and my tongue shriveled like a sun-dried pepper. All the moisture in my body was evaporating, and I crumbled to the ground. I lay there powerless, too weak to fight off Mr. Friendly as he dragged me by the legs into his lair.

It was a mundane Monday, just another dull day on his way to a dreadful job. Dante Agustin was running late for work. He pushed through the other pedestrians, picking up the pace to make it across the street before the light turned, but it was too late.

He let out a frustrated sigh and looked up at the dreary sky. The towers of glass and steel loomed over him like giant overlords, casting their shadows over the minions.

Dante shivered under their cold gaze as he waited for the light at the crosswalk to turn green. He spotted a growing crowd in front of a restaurant, with the line wrapping around the block. He removed his glasses, cleaned the lenses with the cloth he had pulled from his pocket, and slipped them back on.

“HAMS.” It read on the restaurant’s black awning in bold gold letters. |What’s going on over there?” he heard someone ask.

“I heard a new restaurant opened up the other day,” someone answered. “Is it any good?”

“It must be; just look at the line! It’s not even open yet.”

“HAMS! What kind of name is that for a restaurant?”

When he arrived at the corporate building, he rushed through the glass turnstile doors, hurried to the elevator, and punched the button to go up to the 49th floor. With his suit soaked in sweat, he huffed and puffed to his cubicle, where he plopped himself down in his chair.

He frowned at the piles of paperwork that had suddenly appeared overnight in his inbox. They were as high as city skyscrapers. For the next four hours, he stuck to the routine of settling complaints, reviewing forms, and stamping papers with the company’s signature red seal.

The job was physically taxing. The joints in his fingers tightened, and his wrists began to numb. But he buried himself deeper into work. The work overwhelmed him, almost sinking him into the dirt under its steel weight.

The Big Clock on the wall clucked its tongue. Its tick-tocks prickled the tiny hairs in his ears, and the stifling air heightened his irritation. At times, Dante believed the Big Clock was self-aware. It would tease the workers by pretending to glitch—its second hand slowed, and the minute hand twitched.

Have patience, he told himself. It was almost lunch break.

The Big Clock knew what every worker was thinking. Smirking, it lingered a moment longer on the 59th second before moving on to the next minute.

Dante’s stomach grumbled. His growing frustration was locked up inside his guts. He had never once publicly shown a disagreeable manner, which had earned him “Employee of the Month” a few times a year. The recognition came with a company pen, a candy bag, and the best reward yet—a $15 gift card to any diner within a mile radius of the office.

Dante struggled to focus. His fingers tingled as if he had just plunged his hands through a thicket of pine needles. The tingling coursed up his arms to his brain, and then a lightheadedness swept him off his seat. Weightless, he floated from his desk.

His co-workers poked their heads up and gawked like gophers out of a hole. Laughing, he waved goodbye and flew out of an open window. He flew up above the skyscrapers, which narrowed their steely eyes at him and gnashed their glass teeth in rage. They stretched out their long steel arms, whipping them about to grab him by the ankles and chain him back to his desk. But he was too high up in the sky now. He had reached the stratosphere.

The sight took his breath away. Clouds rippled before him like ocean waves, and rings and orbs of heavenly colors surrounded him. He curled up into a ball, closed his eyes, and imagined what it was like to be in a womb. But the high didn’t last long.

A disapproving “ahem” popped Dante’s little daydream bubble. He fell from the sky and collapsed back onto his desk, with an ankle shackled to the desk’s leg. He felt the invisible chain’s weight and its hundreds of tiny teeth digging into his skin and bone.

The building rumbled. It was laughing. The walls and floor vibrated, and the fluorescent lights above swayed.

Sliding his glasses back to their rightful place on the bridge of his nose, he lifted his eyes to look at the intruder.

The Supervisor of Employee Productivity, a large man built like an ox, loomed over the towers of documents, envelopes, memos, and manila folders on the desk, which quivered under the pressure. He existed to make sure the employees were on task. If he caught one asleep or not present at their desk, he noted the minutes and added them to the time they’d be required to stay after office hours.

Overtime... it sent shivers up Dante’s spine. Though he hadn’t served overtime (yet), he had heard from others that after 5 o’clock, the atmosphere on the 49th floor would shift. The air thinned. The lighting glared hotter and brighter, stinging the eyes. The Big Clock took pleasure in the workers’ angst. It slowed, so that seconds stretched to hours. Sometimes it stopped altogether, and the employees would languish in despair for what felt like an eternal sentence, though in reality, only an hour had passed.

“Catching a few winks, Mr. Agustin?”

The Supervisor took one of the papers from Dante’s desk and began reading. He had a fried burger in his other hand. The meat protruded between the buns like a fat burnt tongue slowly slipping over crusty lips. It had a strange and sweet fragrance, like honey mixed with grease.

The Supervisor took a bite of the burger. He helped himself to a second and then a third bite, each time emitting a sound—somewhat of a snort. An oink.

“No, I wasn’t—” Dante started to say, his heart drumming hard in his ears, “I mean, I’ve been just so tired lately...” his voice trailed off, then he cleared his throat and kept his head down. “I know... I know, sir, that there’s no excuse.”

The Supervisor returned the paper to the pile, but it slipped, somersaulted weightlessly in the air, and landed in front of Dante. On the left margin, right by the paper’s edge, there was a greasy thumbprint.

“This isn’t the report that was due yesterday,” said his superior, flatly.

“The report?”

The Supervisor nodded. “Yes, the weekly ‘Self-Reflection on Performance’ report that every employee here is required to submit. Come on, Mr. Agustin, you know that!”

Dante’s stomach dropped. “I haven’t typed it up yet.”

“That’s not like you!”

“W-Well, I... you see…” he fumbled for an excuse, “My computer has been unusually slow, and sometimes it freezes.”

The Supervisor shook his head in disappointment. “Tsk, tsk! Looks like you’ll have to work overtime—”

“But!” Dante interjected. “Rest assured that you’ll receive my report before five o’clock today.”

With bated breath, Dante fidgeted in his seat. He drummed his fingers on the desk. He rolled his pen between his fingers. His right leg shook.

The Supervisor leaned over so that his face was mere inches from Dante’s. A gust of onions, melted cheese, and meat blew from the Supervisor’s flared nostrils and gaping mouth. Naturally, when someone breathed in his face, Dante would have taken a step back. But the aroma captivated him. It reeled him in like a seductress beckoning him to enter the bedroom. His stomach growled loudly. It yearned for lunch.

The Big Clock was just a second away from announcing lunch break. It heard the stomach growls of the workers and purposely yawned, pausing its second hand, which caused its minute hand to spasm. Hearing an employee burst into tears, the Big Clock cackled.

“All right, that’s fine by me,” the Supervisor finally said, “But remember that late work may affect your chances of having your name entered in the lottery for a promotion this year.”

He dug through his pocket and offered a peppermint candy in the palm of his hand. “A little encouragement to keep you going, Mr. Agustin!”

Dante cautiously reached out, and as he picked up the candy, the Supervisor’s hand snapped shut around his like a clam and squeezed.

The blood drained from Dante’s face.

“Is there something else you wanted, sir?” he asked.

“Mr. Agustin, why didn’t you attend the office party last weekend?”

Surprised by the question, Dante thought it over; he tried to remember the reason he gave. Unable to recall, he shrugged and gave the Supervisor an apologetic look.

“I think I wasn’t feeling well that night. Why do you ask?” He sighed in relief when his hand was released from its trap.

The Supervisor shrugged his shoulders. “I noticed that you’ve been withdrawn lately. Perhaps you should attend another gathering that I’ll be hosting this Friday night after work,” his voice rose in excitement, “I’ve just reserved a room at HAMS. Fantastic place! The food there… Well, it’s something else! And they’ve only opened just the other day! I don’t know what it is, but…”

The Supervisor’s voice faded into the background as Dante inspected the man’s glistening face.

Dante removed his glasses, cleaned the lenses with the cloth, and slipped them back on. He squinted. His eyes settled on the nose. It was pushed back like a snout. The nostrils flared and snorted.

He straightened himself up in the chair, crossing and uncrossing his legs. He ogled at the unshaven chins. Two, four, six chins he counted. They weren’t there before. He was sure of it. They quaked with every word as the Supervisor rambled on.

“So, are you going to come or not?”

A pair of black beady eyes zeroed in on him.

“Oh…uh…yeah. Yeah, I mean—I don’t know” Dante stumbled again on his words. “—but, you know, I’ll think about it. I’ll definitely think about it.”

“Don’t be a loner, Mr. Agustin. We’re a family here! And if you want to get anywhere in life, then you’ve got to open up a bit to people.”

The Supervisor smiled, unknowingly showing the chewed pieces of dark meat that bespeckled his beige teeth.

The Big Clock screeched like a banshee, signaling lunch break. The other employees practically leapt out of their chairs, grabbing their hats and coats, and raced towards the elevator hall.

The Supervisor frowned. He hated it when the workers took lunch breaks. It was known in the company that he had made numerous attempts to whittle the break from an hour to eleven minutes.

“Lunch breaks set back productivity,” he once argued. “Hunger is motivation to work a little harder, thereby increasing productivity!”

Dante pushed back his glasses on his nose. He was fixated on the Supervisor’s face. Did his eyes get darker? Did his nose seem stubbier than a moment ago?

The tuft of hair on his chins, however, glistened even more.

These questions and thoughts on his close observations followed Dante across the street to the mass gathering at the restaurant, HAMS. Every man, woman, child, cat, and dog were waiting outside. With a ticket number in hand, they pressed their wet noses against the windows, anxious for the hostess to call out their number.

A savory smell poured out when the hostess opened the doors and called out a number. The smell cast a spell upon the mass of curious and excited diners. Their noses turned up, and they took a deep breath, holding it in their lungs to savor the aroma as long as possible before releasing it in one longing sigh.

Dante admitted to himself that he was no different from those who crowded before its doors. And like them, he was entranced by the smell. His mouth salivated.

When his number came up, he pushed through the herd who groaned in disappointment and angrily grumbled about the long wait. The hostess flashed him a saccharine smile and escorted him to a table for one. Then, a beaming waitress approached his table. She recommended the “HAMS House Burger,” their current popular dish. It came with thick potato wedges, a generous amount of coleslaw and pickles, and a soda with a silly straw that had more loops and curves than a roller coaster. But after a few minutes scanning the other dishes listed on the menu, he decided to order the pork onion soup, and the waitress complimented sincerely on his choice.

Slouching in the chair, he glanced around the crowded, smoky restaurant, curious to know what others had on their plates. The first thing that struck him was the alluring smell. It played and twirled with his nostril hairs. It kissed his mouth and tugged at his tongue. He shrugged off his jacket and loosened his tie.

“Perhaps I should’ve ordered the house burger,” he thought. “Is it too late to change the order?” But as he raised his hand to wave at a waitress, he caught sight of a couple sitting at the table next to the window, where a group of salivating young folks peered in from the outside.

Two juicy “HAMS House Burgers” sat happily on plates before the round and pink couple. They tended to the burgers with such care and awe, as if they were the proud parents of newborn twins. Their mouths enclosed the meal, and instantly their eyes darkened and glazed like melted sugar poured over chocolate doughnut balls. They basked in waves of carnal lust.

The burger’s grease glowed like gold and shone on their chin hairs, leaving little golden droplets on the front of their shirts. The woman’s peach-shaped face darkened from pink to magenta, and her greased pink lips shone like polished wood.

The man’s forehead sweated as he undid his tie, easing the discomfort on his growing and reddening neck. The ends of his handlebar mustache stood erect. After lingering in that blessed moment, they gorged on the food without restraint.

Dante turned his eyes away, sickened by the scene yet secretly aroused. He laid his gaze on a loud family of five seated at a long table. They had a small child who restlessly swayed in its highchair. He noted that each plate had the house burger, and even the child fed on some morsels served in a little trough. Their eyes darkened and glazed over, too.

So absorbed by the scene, he didn’t realize the waitress had already brought his hot soup. The aroma, like a pair of lovers’ hands, rose from the bowl to cup his cheeks in its warmth. It pecked him on the nose and moistened his lips.

He gingerly dipped a finger and tasted the creamy soup. It tasted sweet like honey and bitter like blood, and though that would make anyone recoil in disgust, the flavor roped him in. The steam rising from the bowl whipped around his neck like a noose and yanked him closer.

Just as his tongue rolled out to dip into the soup, he heard a creature oink. He glanced over at the other diners around him. In disbelief, he removed his glasses and searched for the cloth in his pocket.

“I must’ve left it at the office,” he mumbled to himself as he used his shirt to clean the glasses.

The people were changing. Their eyes shrank into beady black eyes, and their noses shifted into snouts. Their clothes stretched and ripped at the seams as their bodies transformed into the shape of pot-bellied pigs. With each bite of the HAMS burger, they snorted and squealed in excitement.

He wasn’t imagining the event at all. No, no, no. This was truly happening! He clutched his chest in shock with one hand and gripped the tablecloth with the other. He watched as the diners fell to the floor on newly morphed four-toed feet. High-pitched squeals ruptured from their mouths.

Then, chaos broke loose. What were once well-mannered humans were now aggressive, loud, and riotous pigs. They ran amok. They turned over tables and knocked down chairs. Plates, mugs, and wine glasses shattered on the floor. Silverware was scattered, and the tablecloths and napkins were shredded into bits.

Caught in the whirlwind, he clung to the chair for dear life but was violently thrown off. He froze as a couple of pink creatures approached him. They sniffed and licked the soles of his shoes. They snorted, sniffing their way up to his pale face. One smeared grease across his cheek with its lips.

Then, realization struck him. He recognized the peach-shaped head of the creature and its companion with the erected handlebar mustache. It was the couple he had seen earlier.

Their black beady eyes bore into his. He saw a sliver of their former selves. They were once like him. They were once chained to a desk and buried six feet under a pile of paperwork and had served overtime. But now they were free! They had never felt so liberated and jovial. They could eat whatever they wanted, love whomever they lusted after, and roam wherever they desired.

“Be with us,” Dante swore he heard them say.

With trembling hands, he reached out and stroked their heads. His heart fluttered. Their short coarse hairs tickled his fingers, sending a strange but thrilling sensation through him. They leaned into his touch. For the first time in a long while, he was moved.

All the stress and frustration that had built up inside of him for years and years, one layer atop another, finally collapsed!

A howl ripped through his throat. It shook the walls, cracked the floor, and shattered his glasses. He was exhausted but at peace.

Leaning forward, he kissed them both on each blushing cheek. Then, wrapping his arms around one of them, he nuzzled their skin and breathed in their scent. The softness of their flesh made his skin hum in excitement. As he sank his teeth into their softness, joyful tears flooded his eyes as the metamorphosis coursed through his body.

Earlier version first appeared in The City on the Hill Press (est. 2005/2006).

Every day, I try to pick up fragments of my former life, piecing together memories of a world long gone. It all unraveled when a lab-grown virus, clumsily unleashed by a scientist with butterfingers, brought about the apocalypse.

First, you’ll cough and feel a subtle tickle in your throat, but by the end of the day, swallowing becomes difficult. It’ll feel like you’ve got a cactus lodged in your throat. Your body rejects all food and drinks. Three to five days later, you simply drop dead, but then you come back.

There are still a handful of survivors scurrying about. They run off and hide as soon as they catch sight of me. There’s one little creature that doesn’t run away scared from me. He follows me around, wagging his tail enthusiastically as he barks joyfully at my side.

Are you hungry, Buddy?

He barks twice and spins around.

I’m hungry, too. I crave something human: a hand, some brain, and fat. Rich. Buttery. I long for the human touch, and I see that the other undead do, too.

For now, I guess it’s you and me, Buddy.

Just you and me.

The teacher felt the mist hit her face. Her eyes shot to the little boy across the table. He grinned happily while tracing the ABCs, unfazed by the thick strings of dark green ooze dangling out of his nostrils.

“I’ve a box of tissues over there,” said the teacher, pointing to the Kleenex box on her desk. “Go grab one.”

The boy shook his head stubbornly and replied, “I’m alright,” before audibly sucking the slimy green strings back up his nose.

“Are you sure?”

“Yup.”

The second sneeze was stronger and deafening. The other students ducked under the tables, while the force threw her off her chair. When she got up on her feet, she found the boy still diligently engrossed in his assignment. Strands of green snot dangled from his nostrils, and slowly, the goop slid over his lip and all the way down to his chin.

A weight fell on her hand. She looked down to see a glob of the green thing on her wrist. She felt herself turn green. She fought hard to keep her lunch down. As she reached for a tissue, her hand froze in mid-air as the glob unexpectedly expanded and morphed into a hand. It clamped down on her wrist.

She made a move for the hand sanitizer. The green hand tightened its grip. She screamed and gagged. It slithered up her sleeve, creeping toward her shoulder, and pressed its index finger against her trembling lips.

Shhh.

The boy looked up with a wide grin on his elfin face, his eyes gleaming with pride. “I’m all done!” he exclaimed, triumphantly holding up the assignment. Each alphabet letter was perfectly traced.