Cold. It was always cold.

The curious meat Sandra was about to eat sat plated on the table before her, freshly cooked and fashioned to fit the restaurant’s specialty. Three thick strips of pork, shaped to resemble the third Roman numeral, oozed dark red juice onto the ceramic pedestal. They had been viciously maimed with several jagged, ragged fleshy thistles protruding from their skin, mimicking a bad hair day or terribly knitted scarves.

“Happy birthday, Momma. Can’t believe you’re ninety-two!” Hilda cheered, clapping her concealer-blushed hands as she sat across from her.

Considering how religious Hilda was about dining at the restaurant, it felt as though every day was Sandra’s birthday. Without falter, her daughter had them sit at the same table with the same exact view of the decorated flowerpot spicing the same bland corner. A corner that exhibited the establishment’s logo on the clay cup’s delicate, golden-bronze skin: a white wooden handle with a silver-glinting rectangular base below—a cheese grater.

Multiple depictions of this image watched Sandra from the table’s artistically patterned surface. Like a grapevine of eyes, they studiously studied her through their serrated pits. But even so, the eyes that shadowed her most had always, always been Hilda’s.

“You gonna need some help?” she asked, waving her fork and knife.

Sandra winked before heaving her brittle hands onto the table and creeping them toward the cutlery. With the fork in her grasp, it squirmed, threatening to fall as her shuddering hand moved to stab the meat.

“Maybe you need some help.”

Sandra winked again. One meant no, two meant yes, while three were maybe. Sandra’s favorite was one wink.

She speared the closest slab of prickly pork, managing to only strike with an outer tine. The other three awkwardly clashed against the plate, producing a sharp, clanging echo that momentarily rang her ears, reminding her of the mariachi band performing behind her. Continuously playing, they reverberated like a white noise. Like a ghostly orchestra. To appreciate them, she’d turn and watch if she could, if paralysis hadn’t imprisoned her in a wheelchair.

Hilda screeched her chair back and rounded the table. “Let me cut ‘em up for you.”

Releasing the fork, Sandra watched her daughter dice the food into bite-sized pieces. Afterwards, Hilda snatched her mother’s hand and firmly wrapped it around the fork, guiding and properly penetrating the meat with it before resting back in her own chair.

“Wish Daddy was here to see this. He’d be proud.”

Portraits of handsome men flashed through Sandra’s mind. Their visages vanished as soon as they appeared. All she remembered was that ‘Daddy’ had been gone for at least a year now. Perhaps that was all she wanted to recall.

As she inched an uneven ration toward her mouth, her weakening arm throbbed and plunged down. So as support, she feebly moved her other arm beneath the former and finally bit into the flesh.
Cold.

Why was it so cold? Hadn’t it just been cooked?
As its scarlet juice leaked down her chin, its bitter, glacial taste frosted her tongue like venom. But what struck her the most, what startled her most were its meaty, thorned hairs coolly tickling her gums, feeling as though a nest of spiders were dancing down her mouth, making her cringe with every reluctant bite.

“Yummy,” Hilda said, grinning, not having taken a bite herself yet.

Sandra avoided her daughter’s piercing eyes. Seemingly the only real eyes around. Because where were the waiters or other customers? And when had the food arrived? She couldn’t remember seeing it served. It was as if it had always been there.

Haunting her.

“Something wrong?” Leaning and reaching forward, Hilda plucked a grater from the table’s center where flowers would normally reside.

How long had it been there and why hadn’t she noticed it? Did she not want to? It didn’t matter now, because now, now she couldn’t repel her horrified mind from it.
Creeping to her side, her daughter seized a grainy cube of roughened meat with her bare hands. “Is it not well done?” She began rubbing, viscously scrubbing every side of the morsel up and down the grater, doing the same with the rest. When she finished, she found her chair and stationed the grater back in the table’s center. Red shredded meat lingered in its eye sockets.

Sandra gulped a hoarse ball of warm spit. She felt the grater’s biting presence sear down her parched throat. To distract herself, she was willing to take another bite when Hilda began giggling a smileless, joyless laugh. Her face was an expressionless canvas, yet shrilling laughter somehow tore through. Laughter that Sandra hadn’t heard since her daughter was a child.

“Can’t wait for you to see your surprise. This ain’t even your gift.” Hilda gestured to the room.
Surprises from her could range variously from concerning to outright frightening. Sandra couldn’t recall most of them, yet the terrible feeling of dread and guilt they had scarred would forever be stamped onto her stained soul.

The only gift she could remember had been for Paul. The cheese grater was concealed in wrapping paper, but its tormentingly recognizable shape pressed through its wrapping. Hilda’s youthfully naive smile and longing eyes had studied her father, hoping for a quiver of gratitude, gratitude that never showed. Instead, Paul had expressionlessly stood from the couch and strolled out the living room, leaving his untouched gift presented in Hilda’s desperate, unloved hands.

Sandra cackled nervously at the memory. And like Hilda’s, her numb, weary face remained still as she did. Fortunately, however, her humorous, shrilling sigh relieved her mind from whatever had been poisoning it moments earlier.

“What’s funny, Momma?” Hilda’s laugh faded at the sight of her mother’s.

As if she was suddenly possessed, Sandra’s body lurched forward and thumped backward, gasping for breath. A lump had buried itself tightly in her burning throat. She reached to clutch her neck, hoping, striving to shove the claustrophobic groove down, but her body wouldn’t allow the movement.
And as if they were on loop, the mariachi band continued playing the same song they had been since the start, drowning out her desperate gasps. But why, why were they still playing? Couldn’t they see she was dying?

Perhaps death would be a mercy. A mercy for both her and her daughter.
Despite Paul’s heretical arguments against it, Sandra had always believed in an afterlife. What it looked like, what it felt like, she didn’t know. Heaven. Hell. Purgatory. What if death were like waking from a dream—a dream within a dream.

Either way, she hoped her next life would spare her of cheese graters. She had seen too many of them in this lifetime—too many graters and too little forgiveness.
Hilda rushed to her mother’s aid, patting her on the back, each pat feeling like a vicious bite, forcing clumps of wet, chewed meat from her mouth. Their grated bodies stroked her throat as they spilled through, scattering onto the table and floor.

“Great. Now I gotta clean all this up.”

Wasn’t that a waiter’s job?
Hilda slipped a napkin from the table and cupped the grisly remnants with it. When she finished, she sat across from her mother and glared incredulously through her.

An incessant silence devoured the room. To break it, Sandra anxiously scraped an uneven nail through an ancient groove on the table’s side. Back and forth she went. Like a slab of meat grinding down a grater. The sight of Hilda twitching at every scritch and scratch fueled her stubborn nail. It didn’t care that it was chipping under pressure, it was as if it had a devilish mind of its own. As if it hated Hilda.

But while cringing, her daughter managed to ask, “Mom, why don’t you eat?”
At this, Sandra stopped and lost whatever was left of herself in Hilda’s penetrating eyes. Her once pure, delicate eyes. Eyes that now belonged to a stranger. Eyes that reflected a burdened monster. A monstrously twisted, distorted reflection perfectly reviewing the revolting nature Sandra had buried within herself—within her marriage.

Paul was fortunate to have gone first. But sometimes it seemed as though she was the one who had died and he was somehow still lurking in the darkness—inside mother and daughter.
Blaming him was easy, but evidently Hilda blamed Sandra too. The grater displayed on the table preached as much. It was a reminder. A reminder of what she could’ve prevented.
The contemptuous disdain in Hilda’s beaming eyes lingered as she said, “You’re not hungry anymore? Then I think it’s time to show you your surprise.” Standing and creeping around the table, she snuck behind Sandra’s chair.

Sandra witnessed herself reverse and depart from the table as Hilda spun and wheeled her forward.
Straight ahead was a white, golden seamed kitchen door where the cooks supposedly were. Was Hilda taking her there? Was finally seeing the restaurant’s staff her surprise?

As they went, Sandra examined the other half of the dining room. The side she rarely saw. Apart from the peculiarly unmoving mariachi band who seemed frozen in place, it perfectly mirrored the side she was used to. It was littered with tables and chairs, flower pots, and the eatery’s coincidental emblem.
But the closer Hilda brought her to the door, the more the room seemed to elongate—run away from them. The door, the white, heavenly door was the only thing remaining stationary, the only thing they were indeed approaching.

And when they did, when it was within kissing distance, Sandra realized what should have been plain all along —what she had been denying all along: the simple reality of the illusion. The restaurant, what she had believed to be a restaurant, was nothing but a claustrophobic room. The numerous tables, chairs, pots—even the mariachi band—were nothing but elaborately painted scenery. And in a dark, desolate corner loomed the silhouette of a record player broadcasting beneath a tarp.
Hilda leaned over Sandra, twisting and pushing the doorknob.

When it swung open, a biting breeze of frosty air gushed through the screeching door.
Cold. Purgatory was cold and dark.

“Happy birthday, Momma!”

© 2026 Cody Creiger