LUCIFÉR’S LUNCHEONETTE – By Geox
They call him Abraxas Jones, though the migraine‑pink neon above the French doors can barely cough out LUCIFÉR’S LUNCHEONETTE—A Proud Subsidiary of Perdition Holdings LLC™. A brass plaque under the sign keeps crashing to the pavement, as if even gravity is fed up with late‑stage branding. The municipal boosters still market this sweat‑slick delta as the Paris of the South, which is like dubbing a raccoon Coco Chanel and acting surprised when it rifles your trash.
Every noon Abraxas slides cherry‑red latex gloves over hands that once swung a flaming sword but now must placate OSHA, Yelp, TikTok’s Community Guidelines, and the gluten‑free lobby, all while pretending the milk frother isn’t possessed. The chrome blender shrieks; strawberries spiral into a saccharine tornado; French‑vanilla ice‑cream detonates like artillery from Eden’s evacuation order.
“Observe,” he orates in a professor‑gone‑postal baritone, tilting the pitcher for the livestream. “How self‑love procures the common milkshake.” Adam Smith would nod, if his corpse weren’t spinning fast enough to power a mid‑size grid. The locals swoon and demand five extra pumps of syrup; the tourists crank their ring‑lights to Maximum Beatification and capture thirty‑second reels no one but the algorithm’s maw will see.
Heaven crackles in his pupils, seraphic choirs’ spool in hexameter, thunder rumbles in righteous iambs:
Better to reign in sulfur than shrivel in Eden’s frost; Yet fiercer still the mortal thirst that creams and churns and costs.
Milton would invoice. Abraxas wonders if Paradise Lost could chart on TikTok if he added a cottage‑core dance break.
The lunch bell pings, a sound like a dying push‑notification, and they arrive: blonde, blue‑eyed daughters of HOA monotony, lipstick red enough to collateralize sin. They drift inside like sunbeams passed through three layers of algorithmic color‑grading. Abraxas lines up parfait glasses, a priest setting out sacraments that come with fructose and nondisclosure agreements.
“Fresh strawberries,” he declares, sliding the first glass forward, “plus a dash of rebellion.”
“Rebellion against what?” asks the boldest, her grin polished like a subprime APR.
“Against the binary of duty and desire,” he says, grin splitting greasepaint. “Or, if that’s too conceptual, revolt against bad dairy.”
From a corner booth, upholstery leaking existential stuffing, Žižek detonates, scattering DVD copies of Vertigo like Marxist confetti. “Exactly!” he bellows. “The milkshake is the object petit a, you crave the image of craving, not the lactose itself!” He chokes on his own metaphor and a fleck of whipped cream.
“We know, Slavoj,” Abraxas sighs. “Try the plant‑based option, tastes like deferred revolution.”
Phones ascend like votive candles. Snap. Filter. Hashtag #StrawberryInferno. Somewhere an algorithm rubs its invisible mitts, targeting ads for lip‑plumping serums and guilt‑free sweeteners.
Supply Chain of the Damned: strawberries smuggled from Limbo, where inflation is cocktail‑shaken in purgatorial amber; cream siphoned from spectral cows grazing the eternal fields of Lethe; cherries—radioactive‑red maraschinos cured in preservatives that predate the Big Bang—imported directly from Tartarus’s ‘Going Out of Business Since Forever’ sale. The invisible hand, manicured and horned, keeps cost of goods infernally low while marking up the garnish until it screams.
Half past three, the door exhales an angel investor literally. Charred pinions tucked into an Armani blazer, halo dimmed to a single LED pixel. A battered banjo dangles from his shoulder by what looks like an IPO prospectus.
“Play something redemptive,” Abraxas orders.
The angel picks a D‑minor blues about grace repossessed by venture capital. Molting feathers drift into the froth; tourists applaud the immersive theater and tip exclusively in crypto scheduled to crash before dessert.
“You’re late,” Abraxas chides. “Happy hour evaporated at three sharp.”
“Time is a bourgeois hallucination,” replies the angel, quoting a syllabus pirated from Purgatory’s adjunct faculty Slack.
Evening sprawls; streetlamps buzz like cherubim with ballooning student debt. An ingénue lingers after closing, lipstick glowing coal‑red.
“So, what do I owe?” she asks, producing a titanium card whose annual fee could bail out three hedge funds.
Abraxas unrolls a vellum invoice smelling of brimstone and accounts receivable ink. Miltonic blank verse twines with Smithian footnotes, Žižek doodled in the margin waving a Lacanian graph over a terrified dairy cow. At the bottom, one-line gleams in infernal scarlet: ARTISANAL CHERRY (HAND‑MASSAGED) … $8.99
“Ten bucks for a single cherry?” she gasps.
“It’s cruelty‑free, fair‑trade, carbon‑negative, and blessed by three disgraced televangelists,” Abraxas explains. “That’s overhead.” He lowers a lone maraschino orb onto the whipped‑cream summit—the garnish glows nuclear, the very embodiment of surplus value.
He tastes the final pink dribble himself, savoring the creamy dialectic of sucrose and self‑deception. The jukebox, more Little River Band than Gabriel, launches a trumpet solo so wistful the neon flickers with impostor syndrome.
Counters wiped, lights dimmed, neon sputters one last groan. Desire, he knows, will respawn tomorrow, ruby‑lipped, geotagged, and eager to fund the garnish. Milton will mourn, Smith will audit, Žižek will gesticulate until cocooned in whipped cream, but the devil merely smiles. In a fallen world, the sweetest fruit isn’t perched atop the milkshake at all, it’s the surcharge that convinces you you’ve earned it.
And that, dear customer, is the real cherry on top, now only $8.99 while ethical supplies last.