Billie-Leigh Burns
The devil reads my references, twirling his pitchfork with raw fingers, tapping on the desk with black talons. “It says here you have kitchen experience?”
“Erm… I was a line cook,” I stutter.
“Worked your way up from pot scrubber, did you? Well, let’s see you do it again.”
He pulls a lever and my chair sinks through the flaming floor. Falling for an age, the thick, sticky air slicks like sludge into my lungs – am I dying again?
Thank Go– I mean, Satan! I land on something squishy.
My momentary relief soon gives way to disgust, overwhelmed by the putrid smell. The ‘something squishy’ starts to swallow me whole. Struggling just drives jagged fishbones to pierce through veins into muscle, but soon I slide down the pile of rotting seafood, hitting the granite ground.
“Waste collection’s once a century,” says the voice of a thousand hags, some of them whispering, some of them screaming, all in unison, “You’re lucky – only forty-seven years to go!”
When I scramble to my feet, there’s only one woman there, pickled green skin, eyes of glowing crimson. She speaks with the voice of many again, “I’ll show you to your station.”
I don’t try to engage her in small talk. What would a scaly Gorgon with a crown of horns and I have to discuss anyway? What lovely flames we’re having today?
My station is a grimy basin in avocado green. There are stacks of dishes, reaching the ceiling above, except there is no ceiling, just a roaring inferno where the sky should be. Palms blister at the merest splash of stagnant water, and the plates get filthier the longer I scrub.
I dare to peek around the rest of the kitchen. An endless mound of potatoes seems to never shrink. The prep cook must be numb to cuts and scrapes by now; with every slash of the peeler, he slices another chunk of flesh from his hands, sometimes a whole thumb. It grows back eventually, but his shrieks sound like a stump would be kinder. Another chef, her hat askew due to the axe embedded in her skull, takes the bloodied potatoes and blends them, thumbs and all, into a grey-looking mash.
As I scour my fingers to splintering bone, I try not to be distracted by the goats dropping from the ceiling, landing in a heap by a butcher. Occasionally, it’s a lamb. All of them sacrificed in the name of Satan. The butcher scrapes the meat from their bones, chucking all of it – including guts, pelt, and maggots – into a lead pot, flecks of paint mixing with the broth.
“Service!” all thousand hags cry from the Gorgon’s throat.
Steve Irwin takes his place in the cafeteria line. I ask him what he’s doing down here. He says he used to mix textiles. I look down and realise I died wearing jeans and a woollen jumper. He seems in good spirits though, despite the conditions.
But a swarm of critiques sting like angry wasps as the Gorgon chastises me. “None of these plates are chipped! Are you kidding me? Don’t you want our guests to have a miserable time?”
At least we have smoke breaks. That’s a step up from McDonald’s.
Billie-Leigh Burns is a writer from Liverpool. Her work has been featured by 50 Word Stories, 101 Words, Funny Pearls, and The Mersey Review. She is also a bookkeeper, making her the only writer she knows who owns an ‘I Heart Spreadsheets’ mug.
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Featured photo by Jesse Yuqui (Pexels)
