Salad Scuffleupagus
Niko Krommydas

“No green peppers?” I ask.

“Fuck off,” the salad bar side-jaws.

“Eat the yellow ones.”

“I hate the yellow ones.”

”Fuck off.”

I dropkick the salad bar in the walnuts. Broccoli and bacon fat and carrot shrapnel fly at my neck, but these situations are why obese men grow ponytails. I turn and my ponytail applies some Judo submission on the vegetables—a gogoplata, I believe …

———

We scuffle past the hostess and into the parking lot. This is They Live and I am Roddy Piper. Teenagers with dyed bowl-cuts and flat asses follow and so do their flat-assed parents. Croutons are Tommy-gunned toward me, but I take cover under a parked Chevrolet Tahoe, and so the innocent flat-asses are mauled and feasted on and cranberries breakdance around us, maybe raisins. It was clear I was dealing with Russians, or ex-Russians, or …

———

My ponytail, who is trying out new cleat orthotics, dropkicks the salad bar into a Ford Taurus windshield. It doesn’t move. This is They Live and I am Roddy Piper and I have just defeated Keith David.

I return to the diner and order sautéed girl. The meat is tough. She tastes Russian. I return the girl. I’m hungry. The salad bar limps up and vomits cherry tomatoes on my corduroys.

“Fuck off,” it says.

I make a plate of yellow ones and do just that.

Niko Krommydas' writing has appeared in Doorknobs & Bodypaint, Thieves Jargon, Kill Poet and The Abacot Journal.