[milktoaste]

The Sauce
By Charles J Hannah

Jason peers out from behind the double doors through a round glass window that leads into the diner. He is awed by the busiest lunch rush this diner has seen in nearly six years, since his mother past away. Large groups of teenagers were piling into booths laughing and flirting while locals from nearby towns surround the Formica counter top with satisfied gestures, wiping sticky sweet BBQ sauce from their grins. His father’s new secret sauce was bringing their tired diner back to life; everyone who tastes it eagerly comes back for more. Barbeque ribs, barbeque chicken, barbeque sauce in cups along with baskets of French fries. The waitresses sneak it home for their kids; men buy bottles of the sauce to take home with them as well. Jason knows word is spreading fast and soon everyone in town will have fallen for his father’s sauce. Finally the bank will stop hounding him for over-due payments, payments that neither he nor his father will have to worry about anymore.

It was only six weeks ago when his father first returned home with the sauce. He had a large mason jar full of it, roughly a gallon or so in a duffel bag safely wrapped in many towels like some sacred ancient artifact. At first glance Jason didn’t understand what his father was so excited about. It looks like any ordinary sauce, a slow pouring deep brownish red. But there is something strange about the sluggish sticky liquid in that jar, about the way the flavor grows on a person. It makes you eat more. His father said he discovered the recipe quite by accident during his latest bible dispersing trip to South America but he refused to give Jason the secret recipe. During the weeks that followed Jason often caught him boiling large pots of the sauce, but not once could he find any of the ingredients.

“Trust me boy” his father said, “it’ll save the diner, and that’s all you need to know.”

“Please, just tell me you’re not buying it from somewhere.”

“Oh no” his father once chuckled, “This sauce is all me.”

His father was determined to be the Carlton County Fair winner for best BBQ sauce, and to place his blue ribbon next to the ones he’s earned for his homemade pies. One smell of his new sauce and its tangy sweet aroma basted over a juicy pile of smoked ribs would be enough to draw crowds for miles. No one can resist its evolved perfection. Jason’s mind was too concerned with bank loans and marginal profits, and so the diners’ recent gains made him more than willing to over look his father’s secrecy.

However, that all changed this morning, when Jason found his father’s body lying on the kitchen floor; another pot of sauce burning on the stove. No ingredients laid out on the counter, just the pot of sauce and an old wooden spoon. Jason remembered his mothers passing, and how the nurse felt her neck for a pulse before closing her eyes for the last time. He carefully reached down with his first two fingers, but before he could reach the pale blue skin something suddenly moved from inside his father’s mouth.

A large hard worm slowly curled as it pushed open his father’s odd smile. It was thick enough to clearly block the old man’s air way, a familiar reddish brown sauce spurting from the worms end. His father must have contracted it during his trip, and the worm had been turning him into the sauce they were feeding the town. The same sauce Jason himself had been enjoying since his father brought it home six weeks ago.

After hiding his fathers’ body, Jason returned to the diner. He knows it is too late for countless patrons as he turns away from the double doors. There is more than one bottle of liquor in this kitchen; the bourbon sends the worm into a fury, reassuring Jason that he is host to a parasite as well. He grits his teeth and takes a second swig. A strangely familiar flavor mixes with the liquid, not completely unlike blood and perhaps molasses and brown sugar too. He can remember his grandmother telling stories about how people were more likely to get worms from unwashed fruits and vegetables than from uncooked meat. If only she knew.

Jason takes a deep breath to gather himself before walking back out into his late fathers’ tiny diner. ‘Remember to smile, remember eye contact.’ He exhales ‘I wonder how long I have before the worm is done making a sauce out of me?’ He tries not to think about it anymore. ‘I wonder if they’ll like how I taste?’

Jason is met with praise from his customers. All of them smiling with sauce smeared across their faces, he graciously accepts compliments from each of them. As he does so he ignores the pain in his gut, and he ignores the burning and the itching and the crawling, he ignores the sound of 100 customers chewing and the future which he knows is bleak for everyone of them. He smiles and serves up a couple orders of fries to a pretty high school girl and her friends, extra sauce, secretly wishing his father never brought it home with him so many weeks ago. He shamefully places the girls’ money into the cash register, for now all he can do was enjoy the success which he had always dreamed of, and pray the worm would kill him before the town members realize the sauce they so love to eat may have already begun to make a sauce out of them.