If you’re like me, there’s a witch that lives in your city. Maybe you’ve seen her. She drifts through the old growth trees, wilts saplings that brush against her robes. Hair like Spanish moss, face a squished white circle wrapped in a black hood. In her hand, a nest of newborn mice, five or six of them, eyes bulbous and closed, wriggling feet, struggling to right their pink roly-poly bodies. She turns one around in her thumb and forefinger, palpates its swollen belly.

Tonight, I think I see her peeking out from the blind spot of my minivan, hiding in a thicket of kudzu down the ravine. Watching me. Waiting to pop me in her mouth like one of those baby mice. But traffic moves forward and she’s gone once I look back.

One of my children has come down with a 4th ear infection in 4 months, so my minivan and I quest across a road with no name, only a number,  through the last economically vital ring of the city, through the gas stations, car washes, fast casual restaurants, woven together by a network of strip malls anchored by grocery stores, China buffets, dry cleaners, dollar stores, to the 4th pharmacy I’ve visited tonight, trying to find the right antibiotic because there is a national shortage, as the largest pharmaceutical companies on the planet  have deemed the production of this medicine not worth the effort from a profit perspective and there is nothing public healthcare institutions can do about this crisis as they have been incrementally denuded by 40 years of legislation authored by radical free market lobbyists. And everyone knows all this but is plagued by the implacability of the situation.

If you’re like me, you probably have a job at a financial corporation which you reluctantly took when you realized your degree (from liberal arts college which is currently teetering on bankruptcy) would provide no monetary return on investment. And your spouse, whom you love and will probably never divorce, works at a nonprofit funded by the financial corporation that acts as a pressure release valve for the public ire created by said corporation’s various exploitations of people and the environment. And both you and your partner know this but are vexed by the intractability of the situation and oh fuck there’s a Cook Out.

People like you and me, we try not to eat fast food. But we don’t drink or do drugs anymore cause of the kids. And we have learned to heavily modulate our pornography intake, because of our spouses. And we have so few vices left that Jesus fuck may I please just eat a goddamn greasy salty starch and suffer no comeuppance for my actions but no. No,  you may not.

We especially do not eat Cook Out, people like you and me, as we are haunted by the dubious information we received in middle school that they use only grade F meat, which, what does that even mean, like spoiled meat? And if that were the case wouldn’t their customers be walking out of the restaurant with shit-filled pants all the time and maybe they are, we don’t know, cause, you and me, we don’t go to Cook Out. In fact, we tell ourselves that Cook Out is the rock ass bottom of the barrel. But still, I want it.

The traffic signal turns red and I steady my trusty minivan to a stop. A wind burnt man stands in a patch of dried grass on the median, holding a cardboard sign telling a story of medical bills in arrears, foreclosed home, war injury precluding ability to work, hungry children, and then the words get too small to read. The leathery skin of his face makes his eyes pop in the dusk like headlights.

“Help me out with something to eat?” he says.

If you’re like me, you have a huge amount of empathy for people like this man, but you also kind of feel, in moments like this, you are close to a swirling vortex of oblivion that will suck you in never to return so don’t get too close. And when this feeling arises, people like you and me, we summon useful propaganda we read on social media about panhandlers making something like $60k annually and perhaps this provides us comfort in our decision to keep our distance. But deep down, we figure the most likely truth is panhandling is the last stop before succumbing to the crushing wheel of addiction or the law or whatever other immiserations are less of an unintended circumstance of modern society and more of a heightened feature, which acts as a shot-across-the-bow to people like you and me, the implied message being ‘never get out of line or this is where you will end up, on the side of the road, asking minivan drivers for money before being crushed under the wheel of immiseration.’ And we all know this but are troubled by the impossibility of the situati-

“Huh?” the man asks.

“What?” I say.

“You said something about a wheel? Of crustations?”

“I did?”

“Yeah,” the man holds out his hand, “Help me out?”

“Are you real?” I ask.

“What?”

“I mean, is this a real conversation that is happening or are you, like, a literary construct?”

“…the fuck are you talking about, man?”

“Well, see, I went to a liberal arts college that’s almost out of business, right? And I learned sometimes this happens in short stories where a high status protagonist going through an existential crisis encounters a lower status character who provides insight which acts as a catalyst for growth and change in the protagonist. It’s a trope which found purchase in the American storytelling tradition thanks in large part to the Iowa Writers Workshop, which many people rightly believe was propelled to dominance in the literary world by the CIA to push a pro-capitalist message in the arts and suppress any authors critical of the United States imperial project.”

An SUV trumpets behind me. The light has turned green. On pure instinct, I floor it across the intersection, a huge plume of exhaust erupting in my wake. I slam the brakes. Traffic is at a standstill, bleeding almost out into the middle of the intersection. In the rear view, I see the man coughing, clutching his chest, his cardboard sign fluttering to the pavement.

My phone pings. A text from my spouse…

I found a CVS that has the dosage we need but

They close in 5 mins. Can you make it?

Sire thong, I type, not even looking at the screen, my entire focus locked onto the red and white Cook Out beacon. The desire to suffocate this unease under a tarp of melted cheese grows unignorable.

If you’re like me, you’re watching the traffic inch forward ahead of you, toward the CVS, and then you see the turn lane leading to Cook Out, wide open, a verdant pasture almost. You’re telling yourself not to take the turn, to stay on the difficult path, for your family. For the future. For Hope. And you’re begging yourself not to fuck this up because the future has to be worth it even though every indicator tells you the opposite. Just have some dumb, blind faith that this matters, that something matters. Don’t fuck this up. Don’t choose Cook Out. Not tonight…

If you’re like me, you’re looking at the Cook Out drive through menu completely lost, hundreds of riffs and combos on the same four menu items of burger/hot dog/chicken and inexplicably, quesadilla. The voice on the other end of the drive-through speaker is impatient, you can’t understand what they’re talking about, something about a quesorito? and you’re worried there’s some tacit vernacular specific to Cook Out that you’re unaware of because you don’t go to Cook Out. You make the coward’s choice of a cheese quesadilla, but overcompensate by ordering 4 of them even though you’re not even hungry, you ate an hour ago.

If you’re like me, your mind wanders as you pull up to the service window, and you remember how last year a bobcat wandered out of the forest into the city, terrorized a bunch of people on Nextdoor until animal control unceremoniously shot the poor creature. There was that one guy, a jogger in California, who choked out a bobcat. The cat scratched him up pretty bad but the jogger lived. You think you could take a bobcat if circumstances required. Even though you’ve never been tested in this arena, except for that one time a huge horned owl swooped on you while you were out jogging in the early morning.

There was that one guy in town who killed his wife, they made a couple movies about him. Old boy tried to blame his wife’s fatal injuries on a horned own attack. The internet had a good laugh about that one, but they probably never had a horned owl swoop over their heads.

If you’d gotten your master’s degree instead of just a bachelor’s from the bankrupt liberal arts college, maybe you’d concoct a quirky secondary character to say all these non sequiturs, a foil for the protagonist, someone we could underestimate, which would then elicit pathos and depth in our understanding of the quirky secondary character and thus facilitating growth and change in the protagonist. But I don’t have any quirky secondary characters in my life. All my friends work too much to join my late night quests for antibiotics.

“Uhh, we don’t have antibiotics, sir.”

A kid tall enough to make me question my ability to take a bobcat if circumstances required works the service window. He holds out 4 flat paper packages, the contents therein fogging up a little cellophane window and, if you’re like me, the sight of such a thing calls to memory the headline you read recently suggesting Americans eat a credit card’s worth of plastic a month, and scientists have no clue how adversely this is affecting the human biology, but all of them are in agreement it’s extremely fucked. And there has to be some kind of collective psychic breaking point when we can no longer be simply troubled by the impermeability of these compounding crises, and we all know this to be the historically dialectical case but no one knows in what form or at what time this rupture will take place, and the uncertainty of the details in the face of the steadfast certainty of the outcome is yet another compounding psychic afflictio-

“Uhh, ma’am? You’re not supposed to be back here.”

The kid working the window is talking to someone, maybe the next customer in his headset, but he is hunched in fear, the way an animal crouches to make itself smaller, in anticipation of fighting or fleeing. My instinct is to open my quesadilla packages.

“Ma’am,” he shouts, “Please step away from the deep fryer!”

A roiling hiss comes from inside the Cook Out, like rapids in a heavy rain. The kid rips his headset off and wriggles out the service window, squeezing between my minivan and the black tile facade of the Cook Out until he is free and runs toward a cop car, shouts something at two officers tucking into heaping barbecue sandwiches.

If you’re like me, you’re thinking this is no good because cops only tend to make things worse, or this is what the internet has led you to believe, you’re not really sure as you don’t ever interact with the police but if you did, hoooo boy would you give them a piece of your mind about all the fucked up things they do, but probably you would not do that. Big Double Hamburger Combo people confront the cops, not cheese quesadilla people. The cops approach my minivan, speaking into those little radios clipped to their shirts and doing that thing where they rest their hands on their guns, when clouds of smog begin to pour out of the service window.

The witch stands inside the Cook Out, wreathed in grease fire, enrobed in black smoke. She raises a boney finger, leans through the window, arm extending from her cloak, lesions dribbling jaundice pus, her fingernail, brown and cracked like pine bark, elongates from the cuticle.

I shovel fistfuls of quesadilla into my mouth, chewing the soggy tortilla as fast as I can, not enjoying it, unwrapping another before I have even crammed the fullness of the first past my lips, molten cheese scalds the insides of my mouth, and I feel a sick, stabbing pain from my stomach signaling it can hold no more food.

The cops shout at the witch, guns beaded. I tell them to stand down, I don’t want their help, I’m not a ‘call the cops’ guy, but my mouth is stuffed with curd and flour and nothing intelligible comes out.

Her serrated fingernail tickles my eyelashes, pricks my cornea. Through tears, I tell the witch, please, I have kids, I need to make it to the CVS before it closes, I’m not sure if she’s aware but there’s a national antibiotic shortage. I have a partner whom I will probably never divorce, I have kids, I’m working on my issues, this is my last vice, I promise, I don’t even drink anymore, I’ve been heavily modulating my pornography intake.

She smiles. Teeth lightning bolts. Gums wet with black saliva. She laughs at my weeping. The cops shout. The smell of burning grade F meat floods from the Cook Out. Hallowed fire eats the trusses of the building and I want to be a good person. I’m just trying to do the right thing but I’m weak. Can I please have a future? Can I please live for something?

If you’re like me, the last thing you tell the witch before the earth opens up, as a latticework of spider demons emerge, wave-like, to swallow your minivan, is that you made a conscious choice this evening to avoid Chic-Fil-A on moral grounds and you should get some credit for that. And perhaps you will, in the great halls of fast food Valhalla.