Third Place: Double Hashbrowns, Plain

Double Hashbrowns, Plain

by Klaus Turk

Third Place

The paprikash recipe called for diced tomato, so Cheryl pulled the knife from the corpse's eye. Blood waterfalled to the floor. Frowning, she nudged the body over so that the floor by the counter didn't get slippery. She washed the knife off in the sink, scrubbing until her sponge turned from yellow to crimson to pink and back to yellow again. She tossed the sponge.

With her implements clean, Cheryl began dicing. The meditative flow of cooking set into her bones and the world washed away. Time lost its impact; all things became central and personal. There was nothing but the knife and the stove and Cheryl's hands.

There was no body on the floor and no blood on the tile. There was nobody beyond the door who would ask inconvenient questions or call about the smell of decomposing flesh or show up with a badge and warrant and gun. While Cheryl cooked, all was set to right.

She stared at the dutch oven as it simmered. Normally she would sit with a book or turn on the TV while waiting. Today, she couldn't bear the reminder that there existed anything beyond the apartment door.

After an hour, she served herself a deep plate of broiled potatoes and chicken paprikash. It was comfort food, an old favorite. She sat down to eat. Five bites in, she felt her body heave from within, and suddenly her plate was full of bile.

Cheryl slid the contents of her plate into the trash can. As she did, her hands shook. She felt that she might drop the plate if she kept trying to hold onto it, and she could've sworn that Satan himself whispered in her ear: throw the plate down with all your might; after all, it's better you commit evil well than fail to do good.

Two hours later, Cheryl exited the apartment. Inside, she left shards of a thrown plate scattered beside the dead man, and the rest of the untouched paprikash on the stovetop. She took with her a pocket knife, all the cash she could find, her phone, a bag full of all the clothes she thought she might ever wear, some toiletries, the car keys, and her Bible.

She packed all her things in the car and set out into the Miami twilight. She rode twenty minutes north until her stomach reminded her with a roar that she hadn't kept any food down. By now only the streetlights and gas stations and Waffle Houses were still alive. Cheryl settled for Waffle House.

Cheryl walked through two sets of doors, in between which was a room that only seemed to serve as a threshold. There was a name for that type of room, but it escaped her at the moment and she soon lost interest in the thought. Inside, it looked like every other Waffle House, perfectly cookie-cutter. There were red booths that flowed in an uncomfortably smooth pattern aligned like pews at the world’s tackiest church, and the elevated but low-backed counter stools that squeaked something awful. There was never a good place to sit in Waffle House, but Cheryl took the counter.

Only one employee was in. His name tag said John. There were no other customers.

Cheryl took the menu and stared at it for a while, like she'd never seen it before.

"You know what you want to drink?" the man asked. Cheryl looked up. His face was unnerving. Too symmetric, like God had taken a mirror to the left side of his face and traced it perfectly to make the right. He would've been attractive if he looked less dollike.

"Nothing to drink. Hashbrowns, please. A double."

"You want anything on those hashbrowns?" he asked.

"No."

"Just plain hashbrowns. No cheese. No gravy. No ham. No onions."

"Yes."

"And that'll be all?"

"Yes."

John shrugged and went to make the hashbrowns. Cheryl sat and let the air conditioning whisper in her ear. A few minutes later John was back with a plate. Cheryl dug in. It was hardly gourmet, but it was good to eat something she knew she would keep down.

"Are you seriously eating that without any ketchup?" John interrupted.

Cheryl, face stuffed with crispy potato, looked up and glared. "Yes."

"Yuck."

"Would you shut up?" Cheryl asked, or perhaps demanded.

"No, I don't think I will." John's eyes glinted with something stormlike.

"If you're trying to flirt, I'm married."

"Not anymore, you aren't." John's smile was all teeth. "Did you already forget? You killed your husband."

Cheryl's eyes flew wide. How did he know? She should deny it all, she thought. No, that's stupid. She should play it off as a joke. How was she supposed to do that?

John interrupted her panic by laughing. "Don't worry, I don't care. The police won't hear it from me."

"How did you know?" Cheryl questioned, biting her lip.

John smiled and handed her a small yellow slip. $3.80 for hashbrowns. Cheryl paid it and left without tipping, glancing back over her shoulder every second, Orpheus incorrigible, desperate to catch one last glimpse at the terrifying and enchanting otherworld within the Waffle House, even as she sought to escape from it.

Her stomach as full as it dared be, she got back in the car and didn't stop driving. The city lights faded and left only the light of a full moon high above the flat and lonesome highway like it was the road's natural endpoint, like all journeys lead lunar and maybe she could leave Earth behind.

She drove until the moon fell away and the world regained color and her eyes squinted in the sunlight and she passed the dumbass sign that said "Welcome to Georgia," and she desperately needed some food and a place to crash before her car did the crashing for her.

She pulled up a map and found the nearest motel. She got the keys swiftly from an old man who stared uncomfortably deep into her bloodshot eyes before making it clear that he didn't judge her for "gettin’ some medicine, Lord knows we could all use some good chemical help."

Taking all her stuff to the room, Cheryl hit the mattress and slipped away.

She woke up when it was dark. She flipped the lamp switch and sat still on the bed. It was Sunday by now. She should be at church. She didn't deserve to be. She opened her Bible randomly and stared at the page. One of the Epistles: "No man hath seen God at any time" it read, and she wondered if women like her had ever seen God, if one day He would arrive and cast them all to perdition personally out of sheer disdain for the entire gender.

She got in the car and drove around the small Georgia town, one with the same town square as every other southern small town trying to be a city. She parked by the second First Baptist Church she came across. It was still dark, and all others rested. Above the door was a giant cross.

An inexplicable rage burst from her chest. Her breathing grew tight. Never before had a church inspired such emotion from her; always she had been told, sit still, be respectful, be kind, be strong, be honest, be fucking perfect. She wanted to tear the cross down and scream obscenities at it. She wanted to kill someone again just to feel the sheer elation of it. She wanted to find a roof and throw herself off. She wanted to feel everything and nothing all at once, not this horrible half-sensation of mere existence.

The anger rushed forward and she watched from outside her body as she thrust her own fist into the tacky stained-glass window. She was hoping distantly that maybe the glass would shatter and the shards would embed themselves within her skin to remind her that blood still flowed below it. That didn't happen. The glass stayed strong, and she was jolted back into herself as her fist throbbed with sheer agony. Whispering words that her mother would've beat her for, she walked away and got back in the car.

She went further north. By now she was bound for Atlanta, but she might divert her course halfway. She didn't know what she was driving towards, only what she was driving away from. Maybe she should go to New Orleans. She'd never been. Why not treat herself before the end of the world?

She switched routes and began a journey west. As the sun rose, she found herself starved. She stopped at a drive-thru and got fried chicken. It smelled like heaven. It was perfectly crisp, breaded to perfection, loaded with all the beautiful evils of America's health failings. Satan himself must have cooked these. She downed the whole box in five minutes.

Five minutes more and Cheryl had pulled over to the shoulder and stumbled out of her car. She hurled into some bushes, then screamed her anger at the clouds for a while.

The rest of the drive towards Alabama was spent washing the taste of vomit from her mouth. The car still smelled like fried chicken, and Cheryl could've sworn it was taunting her.

Once she crossed the Alabama border, she searched for somewhere to eat. She tried every damn restaurant she could, from barbecue to seafood to burgers, and she couldn't stomach a single bite. In the end, it all led her back to the Waffle House.

There were six other cars in the parking lot, but when she walked in, only one person was there.

John stood at the counter, a small smile playing on his lips.

"Good afternoon," he said. "Welcome to Waffle House. May I take your order?"

“What are you doing here?” Cheryl asked.

“I work here,” John replied, tone making it clear that he believed Cheryl was being in some way unreasonable.

“You work in Miami, though.”

“Don’t be silly.” John was smirking, like this was a shared joke. “I work in Waffle House, not Miami.”

Cheryl had already lost the patience for him. “Are you following me?”

“From my perspective, you’re the one following me.” John’s tone was unconcerned, nearly bored. “Would you like to order anything, or was this a purely social visit?”

Cheryl’s stomach ached at the very thought of food. "Plain hashbrowns. Double size, please."

"What a surprise," he said, but he walked over to the kitchen and got to work on it. Cheryl studied his back for a while. His every movement was smooth and deliberate. His fingers seemed to skate across the air as he plated her food.

“Second Waffle House visit in two days,” John observed, sliding her hashbrowns on the counter. “You’ve been having a rough time, huh?”

“Stop patronizing me,” Cheryl snapped. “You’re gonna give me some answers. How do you know so much about me?”

John’s eyes danced. “You won’t get answers from me by asking questions.” He tapped a rhythm on the countertop, and it sounded strangely familiar.

He watched her eat, and his gaze reminded her of an alligator’s. Heavy, almost lazy, and fully confident in its ability to kill. The hashbrowns tasted like nothing.

“Where are you headed?” John asked when she was done with her food. He was holding her bill, but refused to hand it to her. “Do you actually have a destination, or are you just running away?”

Shame caught in Cheryl’s chest for a moment. She felt an irresistible urge to justify herself.

"I figure I'll go to New Orleans. Maybe I can take a fake name or something. Or maybe I can get across the Mexican border." She hadn't even considered crossing the border until that second, but now it seemed like the only feasible option. She knew Spanish. She could hide there, make a new life. She didn't have to go to prison. She had assumed that her life had ended, but now it seemed like it was only beginning. Maybe there was hope.

"Do you even know how to fake a passport?" John asked. "You forgot yours back in your apartment."

"I wouldn't be dumb enough to use the same passport. That'd get me arrested right away."

"They haven't found his body yet." John stated this with authority. "No one will find the body until about a day from now, when Jamison McIntire from your husband's work stops by to check in."

"Will anyone I know check in?" Cheryl asked.

"Come now, Cheryl," John shook his head and slid her bill across the counter. "I think we both know that no one will miss you."

Embarrassment built in Cheryl's stomach. She'd known that answer was coming. She'd always known, long before meeting John, that his words were correct. She was a hollow person, filled only with the expectations of others. She'd barely ever talked back in school and had graduated with a B average. She'd gone to church and said a million selfish prayers to a God she didn't care about. She'd married the first man who'd ever given her a reasonable bit of attention, and she'd walked down the aisle on her wedding day mistaking her fear for love.

Cheryl had never loved anything in her life.

Normally this kind of introspection would make Cheryl lightheaded or dizzy or nauseous. Today, she just felt angry. She already knew what was wrong with her. Who the hell was John to say all of this? And he was smiling.

God, she hated his fucking smile.

Cheryl stood from her stool and grabbed the plate her hashbrowns had come on. She snapped it in half between her hands, producing a jagged edge, then dropped one half. She grabbed John's head and slammed it down on the counter. He was still smiling, as though she were joking.

“Who the hell are you?” Cheryl asked.

John tapped his fingernail against something plastic under the table. Even without seeing it, Cheryl knew it was his nametag. She growled and pressed his head down again.

“Give me an answer,” she spat, “Now.”

“Oh, Cheryl.” John said, his lips caressing her name like it was precious. “I promise, I don’t want to hurt you.”

His tone was comforting, kind, honest. He spoke like he wanted to help her, like he was just looking out for her. Like he knew her. Like he cared.

Cheryl pressed the jagged half-plate against his neck. She snarled down at him.

John was still smiling. "Don't forget to tip this time," he said.

Cheryl slammed the plastic edge into his throat. Blood sprayed and soaked the counter, her hands, the napkins, but John was still smiling, so Cheryl pulled the plate back and slammed it down again, and again, and again, until the plate had broken again and she was pulverizing the remains of a flayed windpipe with her bare fist.

John's eyes were still wide and earnest, his grin thoroughly amused, teeth showing, blood between them.

Cheryl stood and stared for a while down at the body. Then, she went to the restroom. She pulled off her bloodstained shirt and flushed it down the drain. She could change in the car, and a woman without a shirt was hardly the strangest sight around a Waffle House. She washed her hands and face and everywhere else she saw blood until she saw no more. Then, she walked back out.

The corpse was still on the counter, laughing at a joke no one else knew. Cheryl stared at the body’s pulverized neck and did not meet its still-mirthful gaze. She stepped outside.

No one gave her any more than two glances in the parking lot, and she soon had on a new shirt and was back on the road.

New Orleans was within a day's travel, so she sped through Alabama. In the middle of nowhere, Mississippi, she stopped for lunch and immediately vomited into a trash can. She glanced once at the local Waffle House, and tried not to feel like she was running away by skipping a meal there.

She stayed on the highways, driving like there was a demon behind her. Every now and again she would look down at the speedometer and see a number in the triple digits, only to realize that she’d been flooring the accelerator while staring into the distance and wondering if she would be able to keep down prison food.

Somewhere on the Mississippi road, a cop car showed up behind her, wailing its siren like the horns of an ancient war band. There was no one else on the road. Briefly, Cheryl considered trying to outrun them, but figured that the jig was up. She pulled to the side of the highway and sat with her hands on the wheel. Maybe they’d found John’s body. Had the shirt failed to flush in the toilet properly? Had they tracked the car’s license plate from Miami?

She sat in a spiral of nerves for a while until the officer came up to her window. She had already rolled it down. It was time. She wouldn’t prolong the inevitable.

“Do you know why I pulled you over?” the officer asked.

Cheryl didn’t speak. There were too many possible reasons. She opened her mouth, closed it, then shook her head.

“Ma’am, you were going 90 in a 70. I’m gonna need to see your license and registration.”

Cheryl blinked for a moment, uncomprehending, then passed the man her license and the car insurance card from the glove compartment. He looked at the cards for a moment.

“Whose name is this on the insurance?” the cop asked.

“My husband,” Cheryl responded, her words materializing without her lips’ permission.

The officer nodded and then disappeared. This was it, Cheryl decided, fingers white gripping the wheel. He would check her ID against the system and discover that she and her husband had both gone missing. He’d have to take her back for questioning, and then the truth would come out one way or another, and she would never know freedom again.

Ten minutes later, the officer returned to hand her a ticket. He said something about a fine and payment options and court dates, and there was not a single mention of missing persons or felony charges. Cheryl half-listened. She nodded politely, kept her hands on the wheel, and tried not to blurt out that she was a murderer.

Another few moments and the cop was back in his car, driving into the distance. After a pause to collect her thoughts, Cheryl was back on the road too, determined to drive the speed limit this time. The car was the only getaway tool she had, and she couldn’t afford to sabotage herself.

It was dark again when she drove into New Orleans, but the city lights looked like stars to the sufficiently tired. She should've checked in at a motel, but instead she went to a bar. She'd never been to a bar alone before, and the whole place seemed more intimidating than usual. She tried to make herself seem small even as she ordered a lemon drop martini and downed it in one go. The guy next to her goggled at her, impressed for all of ten seconds, before she ran to the bathroom and heaved the whole thing back into the toilet.

Minutes later, Cheryl was back on New Orleans streets no more drunk than before but out fifteen dollars — fifteen! Christ almighty, what a racket — as she got in the car.

She was hungry.

She knew there was only one food she could stomach right now, so instead of eating, she checked in at a Motel 6 and went to sleep.

In Cheryl's dreams, she was at her wedding again. No one minded that the groom had a knife through his eye. At the altar, John waited for them in a pastor’s costume. His head hung off his neck by a thread.

"Cheryl!" John greeted exuberantly. "Do you take this man to be your lawfully wedded husband, to live together in matrimony? To love, comfort, honor, and keep him, in sickness and in health, in sorrow and in joy, until death do you part?"

The eyes of the congregation were on her.

She heard Satan whisper in her ear: just lie. His voice was so kind, so soft. Lie, he said. You don't have to say the truth. You don't have to face yourself. Why be hurt? Why suffer? Just lie and lie and lie until you can't even tell that you're lying anymore. The hole in your heart doesn't need to be filled. Just pretend it isn't there. It'll stop bothering you. I promise.

John's eyes were still on her, somehow full of life. He was smiling.

Cheryl opened her mouth, and she woke up.

Her stomach growled. There was a dull ache within, demanding food. A pit, vast and yearning. It was still dark out, but she knew she wouldn't sleep again. She got to her car and drove to Waffle House.

When she entered, it was only her and John. He was standing at the counter, his neck smooth and unmarked, his eyes electric, his mouth wide with a grin.

“You forgot to pay last time," he said.

"Sorry."

"Why, I should call the police! A dine 'n dash, how could you!" His eyes glinted and Cheryl’s hair stood on end.

"I'll pay you back today. Can I get some hashbrowns?"

"Sure. Double?"

"Yeah. Nothing else extra."

"Of course."

He turned around and they both listened to the sound of hashbrowns on the griddle for a while. Finally, Cheryl's plate was set full before her.

She dug in heartily, aware of John's gaze but uncaring.

"So why'd you kill me?" John asked when her eating had slowed.

Cheryl tapped her fork on the plate idly. "I think for the same reason I killed my husband."

John's eyebrows told her to elaborate.

"Don't you already know?" she asked.

"Yes, but I don't know it the way you do. I know the truth, the whole truth. You know what's true to you. I care more about the latter, right now."

The air conditioning roared in Cheryl's ears, and she heard no devils whispering.

"I killed him because I hated him," Cheryl spit out. "I was supposed to love him. He was supposed to love me. I was supposed to be happy. I did everything right, I followed every rule." The words couldn't stop now. They spilled from her lips like blood from a wound. "I wanted to love him so much. I thought I did, and then I realized that I didn't feel anything. Maybe I’d never felt anything. He was never cruel or even unkind, and that's all the more reason to hate him: because it's easier to hate him for my failings than to hate myself."

They were silent for a time. Cheryl felt her heart through her skull.

"Don't forget to finish your hashbrowns," John reminded her.

Numbly, Cheryl pulled more food from her plate.

"Mankind hungers for nothing so much as confession," said John. He slid her a yellow slip that said she owed $7.60 for two orders of double hashbrowns.

Cheryl paid with a twenty. "Keep the change," she said. John's grin stretched wider.

"Are you ready for what's waiting out there?" he asked.

"I already know," Cheryl replied. She knew what lay beyond the threshold of this place beyond place, where every city was the same. The windows of the Waffle House stretched ceiling to floor. It was still dark out, and nothing was beyond the glass; instead, it reflected the lightbulbs and booths and picture frames within the restaurant, every ingredient of the building blended together until they were made mosaic.

"Jamison McIntire made it to the police station just a moment ago," John told her.

"You already know what's going to happen, don't you?" Cheryl asked.

"Of course."

"So you know how this ends for me."

"Nothing ever ends," John laughed. "In my mind, you're immortal."

"But in reality?"

"Oh, you'll die too soon. Not as soon as you fear, though."

"Am I going to prison?"

"Yes. It'll be a sad, sad tale. Local news will talk about it for a half hour."

"How bad will it be?"

John's fingers tapped a rhythm on the counter. "You're asking the wrong question." His eyes were on hers. "It will be bad, yes. The world's wrongs will be stark and harsh. The cells will be uncomfortable, and the meals will be awful, and the guards will be cruel. You will hate it. But in a place of unimaginable torment, where evil masquerades openly as justice, you will find that all the lies have vanished from your heart. And you will be, for the very first time, free."

John held out a receipt. Cheryl took it, and smiled.

"Thank you, John."

"I love you, Cheryl," he said, and for the first time in her life, those words sounded true.

Cheryl walked out two sets of doors, in between which there was a room that only served as a threshold. She remembered now that it was called a narthex. She left the Waffle House, the only church she had ever found God in.

She stood now in a different city than the one she had entered from. She saw the sunrise over the Atlantic Ocean. Far away, in New Orleans, a lonely car waited for a getaway driver that would never arrive. Cheryl breathed in Miami air, and her exhale tasted like salt and hashbrowns.

She walked home.

Winning pieces are published as received.

---

Fiction Potluck

July 2026

Third Place Winner:

Klaus Turk

Klaus Turk is a math teacher born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. When he's not teaching math, planning math lessons, or otherwise thinking about math, he also enjoys comedy shows, martial arts, and writing.