The Night The Menu Became Aware

Glitch cinema presents,

THE NIGHT THE MENU BECAME AWARE

A man walks into a restaurant and orders himself.

The waiter doesn’t flinch. “How would you like that prepared?”

“Raw,” the man says. “I’ve been cooked my whole life.”

The kitchen sends back a plate. On it: a small mirror. The man picks up his fork and the mirror picks up its fork and they both realize they’re hungry for something that hasn’t been invented yet.

Meanwhile in the bathroom the soap is having an existential crisis. It was born to make things clean but every time it touches something it loses a piece of itself. “I am literally dissolving into my purpose,” it tells the tap. The tap says nothing. The tap has been screaming water for six years and no one has called it music. In the corner, the toilet brush hasn’t looked anyone in the eye in years.

A woman at table four orders a conversation for two. The waiter brings two glasses of water. She drinks both. Neither of them says anything interesting. By dessert she’s arguing with the empty chair about who forgot the anniversary. The chair wins. It always wins. It has better posture and no need to be right.

The chef comes out. He’s been cooking for forty years. Tonight he made something that isn’t on the menu. It’s not food. It’s the space between the plate and the table. He doesn’t know how to charge for it. He doesn’t know how to plate it. He puts it in front of the man with the mirror and says “this is what you actually ordered.”

The man looks down. There’s nothing there.

“Yes,” says the chef.

The restaurant closes at midnight but nobody leaves because leaving requires a door and someone removed all the doors in 1988 and replaced them with questions. To exit you must answer: what were you before you walked in?

Nobody can answer. Everyone stays.

The candles keep burning. The wax pools into shapes that almost look like letters from an alphabet that was used once, before language, when everything just meant itself.

A child wanders in. She doesn’t have a reservation. She sits on the floor. She starts drawing the restaurant from the inside while she’s still inside it. The drawing contains a girl drawing a restaurant. That drawing contains a girl. All the way down.

Someone asks her what she’s making.

“A door,” she says.

And everyone who hears it is suddenly outside, standing in a parking lot, blinking, not sure if they ate or were eaten, and the stars above them are the same stars that were in the soup that nobody ordered that everyone got served anyway.

The restaurant was never there. The hunger was never there. The man, the mirror, the soap dissolving into its own purpose, the toilet brush that couldn’t look anyone in the eye — none of it.

Just the parking lot. Just the stars. Just the faint taste of something you can’t name on the tongue you forgot you had.

And the child’s drawing, folded once, left on the ground.

If you open it there’s nothing inside.

If you don’t open it there’s everything.

One by one they climb into their rockets and go back toward the stars.

A few never made it. They smelled noodles and followed a ninja into an alley. They were last seen sharing a banana.

my refrigerator speaks fluent whale
and my shoes are filing taxes
a samurai made of noodles
is arguing with the moon about rent

GLITCH GLITCH GLITCH BANANA
the universe forgot its password
GLITCH GLITCH GLITCH BANANA
my skeleton wants a vacation
a ninja made of smoke and yogurt
fell in love with a traffic cone
they had three children
all of them were Tuesdays

the ocean called me collect
said it was tired of being wet
I said me too brother
then I remembered I’m a lamp
GLITCH GLITCH GLITCH BANANA
nothing means anything
GLITCH GLITCH GLITCH BANANA
and that’s the most beautiful part