FICTION: Log Restaurant by Ben Pullar

Hogg insisted they go to the Lucifer Timms' log restaurant and car wash.

'A decent feed,' he grumbled, 'You get free gloves!'

But it was a filthy place. A loathsome dining experience, with muscular ceiling fixtures brass red and fainting everywhere. Hogg made them pin Disneyland badges to their shirts before they stepped through the restaurant doorway. Brubaker was reluctant.

'Stop your moving about now and put up your hands and just go limp, right now, for a moment. Please.'

Brubaker smiled and his teeth were meat traps and it was all very unedifying.

Then L. Jacques appeared. He went straight for the restaurant doorbell, his right wrist brushing past Hogg's earlobe guard on its way to the bright blue button.

'Here, get off!' was Hogg's suggestion. Jacques pressed the doorbell down and started screaming like a priest.

Hogg was getting visibly steamed up, while Brubaker began rethinking his orthodontist's attitude to life.

Jacques removed his fingertip from the doorbell and turned to a momentary wall painting. It was Kichner's circus picture.

'He isn't always like this listeners. He's sometimes quite decent don't you know it?'

Hogg reacted slowly. 'Talking about me one more time, hey?'

Jacques' smile was really revolting at that moment. It was a couple of broken Porsche cars cartwheeling down a lot of terraces.

Then Timms quarter opened the restaurant door. The knob in his hand was weeping with sweat and his nostrils smoked and rattled above his mouth.

'Ah ha, jerks. You jerks ready for a meal?'

'I don't know chum,' was Hogg's long smelling reply, 'there's a twerp here. Got the attitude of a twerp, have to say.'

Brubaker: 'Do you mean me or Jacques?'

Hogg: 'Jacques, not you.'

Brubaker: 'I try very hard.'

Timms said 'well, yes,' and he opened the door wide. He opened it to the same width as Brubaker's open wide mouth that instant, largely because of the pikelet Brubaker had had earlier that morning, which was now doing dreadful things to his stomach. Unfortunately his meat-draped teeth were also put on show. It was a horrid thing to see, like a couple of car accidents leaking.

It was a horror mouth. The meat hung over the teeth like they were hat racks, and the walls of his mouth were even less attractive looking things, sheer drop offs of bad heart accidents, dexterous muscle and pulsing tubes of iron deficiencies and prozac. The tongue was the most appalling thing in the whole mouth though, that was absolutely the case. A plump wafer of scarred corners, it felt eerie. Only some sort of tropical bird perching on it might have distracted from its overall wretchedness, and then only to some sort of drunk media monitor on a backwards mission to a telephone box.

With the door suddenly open wide Jacques saw a chance to humiliate Hogg for all time. He dragged his wrist back to his left hip pocket. He bit his lip. He yelled out 'life!' and pushed his body forward.

His body seemed to almost roar. It certainly wept idly, a cramped eye socket of weak vision. A sudden jamb of indelicate leftwards behavior, it moved Timms to make one crucial statement before things really erupted.

'Life?' said Timms recklessly, 'this ain't even some long sleep deprivation, guy.'

Then, as expected, things really erupted. In hefts.