Dollar Menu (Featured in TiF Weekly #50, 2025)

Ba da ba ba ba, I'm freakin' out

The sign in the parking lot reads: Cinman Dolsay Flurrys R Bak. I applied here last year to no response. Now I’m sitting at a table at 2 p.m., spinning a penny on the laminate, waiting for R, who could be anyone. I wish he’d chosen Wendy’s because it’s a bright day at the end of summer, and Wendy’s has sunrooms. Every time a squad car rips by, my smuggled heart twitches against my shirt. I look around: people on their phones. A middle-aged woman sits at a table piled with garbage, watching videos at full volume. How many here know new history just dropped?

The plan was to rendezvous and leave, but R may not be coming. R may be an internet hallucination. No, if R was the ChatGPT version of Tyler Durden, I would have figured that out. All of this is really happening. He’ll see me and extract me. I make deliberate eye contact with the other lone white males here, most of them oscillating between food-phone-food-phone. A small-faced neckbeard holds my gaze in a way I don’t like.

Kickback radiates in my shoulder. The adrenaline is ebbing. Scary, the feeling of catching up to myself. Delayed memories pour into my head, down my throat. The slipstreams of people running and screaming as I walked through a crowd. Someone slammed into me, and I bit the inside of my cheek. I swallow a salty thread of blood. I should eat something besides blood. Walking to the counter, my ankle throbs; I don’t remember rolling it.

Neither of the two workers behind the counter pay me any mind. They’re watching it on their phones.

“Dead?” asks one.

I remember the hot roof where I laid among the HVAC units, sweat pooling under my stomach. I jumped off the roof into a dumpster, leaving my grandfather’s bolt-action rifle inside it.

“TMZ says yes,” says the other one.

“Crazy.”

The vid loops, their faces get blanker. We still have lives to lead.

“Can I get a burger?” I ask.

One of them mumbles, “You gotta order at the kiosk.”

He’d take my order if he knew who I was. I ask for the bathroom code.

My reflection stands among the smears in the mirror. My mesh basketball shorts signify a student who rolled out of bed with the hangover munchies. My hair is plastered from the hat I’m not wearing anymore. My T-shirt is sweat-darkened from the hoodie I shed. Should I have kept running?

Last May, a prophecy popped up on my feed and fed me well. “The Dream That Woke Me” read like a voice in my head, hopeful and terrifying, because that’s the future, baby.

I sent R a DM, warning him, “There’s probably an FBI van outside your house.”

R replied a moment later. “Come and get me.”

“Loved your story,” I typed back, jittery. “Felt real.”

“My gift to you.”

“Well, thanks, LOL. Everything is so fucked. It’s nice to see someone stand for the truth. What does R stand for?”

“New here, champ? Anonymity is the allure. Don’t put your name on anything, you’re just part of the internet.”

Our thread trailed into the night. Hours became—

“Everyone is crowdsourcing opinions, but nobody wants their mind changed.”

“What do they want?” I asked.

“To be seduced by a taller version of themselves.”

“How tall are you?”

Nights became weeks.

“You took the post down?”

“I don’t need views now.”

My finger edges the penny across a new table while the rest of me sits paralyzed, ready, sick.

What I know about R: R is a genius who suffers from chronic pain from a spinal cord injury from a diving accident. R lives with his cantankerous father, who calls him retarded. His mom died during childbirth, which still happens a lot. R told me that he writes using only his index fingers, pecking the letters while his nose hovers close to the screen.

“Bad for your eyes,” I warned, months ago.

“I’m basically blind. Coke bottle glasses. I’m a crippled, nerdy, weakling. A kiss would probably kill me.”

“I know.”

Months culminated in—

“I’ve never been anybody.”

“Dude. You are someone to me. I’ll be someone for you. I’m not weak. I’ll protect your dream.”

“Do you believe Jesus is Lord?” he asked.

“Hell yeah.”

“Then it’s our dream.”

Over the winter, I grew courage. I sat up straighter. We tracked the hate-monger while he brayed white supremacy and luxury Christianity from campus to campus. Jesus was on his side. Jesus was his trump card, his Aryan homeboy. Jesus was calling.

“We’re going to poke a hole in a false prophet,” I typed, blood beating in my fingertips. “Make it rain.”

Someone slaps a penny down on my table.

“For your thoughts,” she rasps, reciting her line, so I know.

“Interesting times,” I say, reciting mine while not believing how interesting they are.

Shorty’s got a railroad unibrow and a flood of black hair. She’s the one who’s been sitting a few feet away this whole time, watching loud shit on her phone. This is off-script, off menu, animal style. Nothing seems to be wrong with her spine and she’s not wearing Coke bottle glasses and—I did this for a girl?

She sets down two McFlurries. “I got these when you were in the bathroom.” She sits across from me, and I smell her cucumber melon perfume. “Say something.”

“You’re…do you work for R?”

“I’m Raven. And you’re blushing.”

“Why did you lie to me?”

“Men trust men.” She reaches across the table and extends her fingers, which are shaking. Her fingernails, French-tipped with grime, collect mine, squeeze. “Don’t be afraid. I see you. See me?”

I consider threatening to scream if she doesn’t let me go, but she does. Raven starts talking nervously about our future. The plan was to lay low in her friend’s safe house in the foothills of southwest Boulder, but the cops seem so clueless, she thinks we can go back to her place in Westminster. Well, her dad’s place. See, that part was true, she does live with her old man but, “We can fix that,” she says, then takes a long sip through her straw.

“I don’t know,” I say.

“What don’t you know?”

“Anything.”

“Baby, only we know what’s happening. You did so well. Our secret is changing the world.”

I look at the prairie sprawled beyond the window, the grey stroke of highway, the increasingly wooly sky. It all looks the same. I swallow more blood from my cheek.

“Please look happier.” She lowers her voice. “You’re not mourning.”

“I’m so stupid. This is the stupidest timeline.”

“Don’t talk like the internet. We’re past that. We can walk out of here together. It’s a miracle!”

It hits me: I’m meant to be alone; I want to be alone. “I don’t know.”

“Yes you do! Have some McFlurry.”

“You tricked me,” I lean in and whisper, “into killing someone.”

“And I love you for it. You think the world is going to love you for that? They’ll kill you, baby.”

“I’ll disappear.”

“You can’t disappear on your own. Let me keep you safe.”

“If I leave with you, Raven, I’ll feel like I’m betraying R.”

“That person is me.”

“You can’t tell me that.”

“But I’m real!”

“R would never have to say that.”

“Baby, please. I’m right in front of you. Touch me.”

Black, unmarked SUVs with tinted windows and no license plates lumber into the parking lot. I rocket up from the table.

Out stomp the swollen agents of chaos. They kick open the glass door and crash inside, pointing guns at nobody and everybody, these black, brown, pink, pale, big, bad, bald boys wrapped in balaclavas, boots, bulletproof vests. No standard uniform, no standards.

“Immigration!”

One of them shoots a kiosk. One of them tries to jump over the counter, but he bounces off it, then limps around it. One of them grabs a mother around her neck, sending her phone flying. Her kids blur into screams. Workers scatter. The fire alarm gets triggered. A pair of blue eyes finds me over his mask. I make a fist, raise it in the air. Blue Eyes barrels towards our table.

“Fascist!” screams Raven, her phone trained on him. “Traitor! Pig! Where’s your—”

He cracks her in the kisser with the buttstock of his rifle, scattering her teeth like dice on the table. Then he hoists her up and accidentally shoots out a window.

---

Things settle? All the ties have been zipped. Raven, gagged with napkins to staunch her bleeding, gets led outside where her future waits in a van.

Blue Eyes pulls my arm like a slot machine lever, saying, “Hey man, relax. I recognized you.” He snaps his mask down. “Remember me? Glenn Spokes, from our high school wrestling team? Wet towel fights in the locker room?”

“Oh.”

Raven looks back at me, eyes whited out with fear, perfect in her hatred.

“Ha! Fun times,” says Glenn. “Look at us now.”

“Interesting times.”

The grizzled manager is taking orders at the counter, like in the good old days. He keeps calling out to one of the workers restrained on the floor, asking him how to comp meals. The agents have queued up, but the line isn’t moving.

“Fuck this,” says one, “I’ll just go back there and serve myself.”

“Check the ice cream machine,” says the agent behind him.

“So what do you do?” asks blue-eyed Glenn.

“Student. Secret shopper. Sometimes I drive for Uber.”

“I used to gig a lot before this. The signing bonus was in-sane.”

I focus on the little green tree on the pin on his vest while he drones on about the truck he’s leasing. Eventually, I start backing toward the jagged hole in the plate glass window. My shoes crunch glass.

Glenn looks at me askance. “Where are you going?”

Back to the internet.

“I have to go, Glenn.”

“Oh, totally. Cool seeing you, man. What’s your name again?”

“Likewise.”

I’m running like a cross on fire, sprinting in the grey daylight, terrified and alone. Smells like rain, which smells like freedom, which tastes like blood.