Eat Your Heart Out
Buffet. All you can eat. The man in the red Buick Skylark read the flickering neon sign as an invitation and a definition. He was trim with a belly. A thick mustache hid thin lips. He had a long face which seemed too large for his body. His sunglasses, inappropriate for dusk, hid a pair of droopy Basset hound eyes. His gait was stiff and jagged as if a lead weight were attached to his ankle.
The hostess greeted the man from the red Buick Skylark with trepidation, hidden under a nervous smile. The clattering of forks against plates and the chattering of voices seemed to fade away with his entrance. He raised one, lone index finger in response to her question about his dinner party size. She ushered him to a table off in a dark corner of the restaurant.
The man in the red Buick Skylark was the seventh of seven boys. His father, a seventh son as well and a self-proclaimed die-hard Iron Maiden fan, had named him Eddie in honor of the mascot of the anti-Christian heavy metal band. Eddie’s mother was a deeply religious woman who had strayed under the charms of Eddie’s father. Eddie’s father was a morbidly obese, lustful, gluttonous man who pridefully wore his hair long with the belief that it gave him the powers of Samson. In his final days, weakened and bald from chemotherapy, his only desire was penitence towards his children and their mothers. Eddie would never forgive his father.
Eddie was an unremarkable child. Gifted neither intellectually nor physically, he was known for being a mama’s boy among his school mates. He had little interest in much of the school’s curricula and he did the bare minimum required to please his mother. However, he was intensely fascinated by ornithology. As a result, the other students ridiculed him as “bird boy.”
Eddie took a job as a camp counselor in the Pacific Northwest after high school. He would be close to nature where he could watch all kinds of birds, and he’d have a little spending money. There were rumors about Eddie’s behavior at the camp, but his mother refused to believe them. That wasn’t how she had raised Eddie to be. Eventually, the camp leadership had enough and sent Eddie back home to Georgia. When asked about what happened out West, Eddie would shrug and point out that Seattle people were just weird.
“Sir, uh, just to let you know,” she took a step back seeing herself in Eddie’s reflective lenses. “We’re closing uh, um, we’re closing in like 20 minutes.” He returned his gaze towards his steak and cut another piece for consumption. The waitress stood for another beat before walking off.
On a Sunday, the buffet usually ended at ten in the evening. The last hangers-on tonight were college students taking advantage of the opportunity to eat as much as they wanted for less than ten dollars. They were raucous and possibly intoxicated. But Eddie had tuned them out, his focus was on the other remaining patron of the buffet. The last patron was a heavyset man with long flowing hair. Eddie despised him, and had been stalking him like prey the last three weeks. Eddie perceived as greedy and slothful. Slowly, Eddie’s wrath had simmered, and now it was boiling over. He had to go for a smoke.
Of the paying customers, the large patron waddled last out of the buffet. He noticed Eddie standing to the side cooly blowing smoke into the humid Georgia night. “Hey fella you wouldn’t happen to have an extra smoke would you?” Eddie smiled an emotionless smile as he pulled a box of cigarettes out of his pocket. Smiling widely, the large patron picked a cigarette, lit and inhaled it all in one motion. “Boy that feels good right about now.”
The large patron expected smoker’s small talk but received nothing in return from Eddie. “Fella you don’t talk much do ya?” Time felt like it stood still for a beat. Then with the swiftness of a Hawk swooping in on a fish, Eddie unleashed a dagger and pushed it deep through the left pectoral of the large patron. He let out a gasp as the cigarette fell out of his mouth and his body slumped to the ground.
The red neon of the buffet sign was now joined by the red and blue dance of the police strobe lights. Yellow caution tape blocked off the scene. A detective with a scruffy beard cautioned everyone to keep his crime scene clean as he approached the center of the scene. Lying in an ocean of his own blood, there was a note on the large patron’s chest. The detective motioned for pictures of the scene to be taken as he pulled on his latex gloves.
Opening the note between his blue-gloved hands, the detective read “Eat. Your. Heart. Out.”
