Anomaly Flats Read Free Page A

gave you the breakfast menu.” She slapped the new menu down next to the other. This new cover was nearly identical to the first, except the owl was no longer wearing sunglasses; instead, his eyes were wide open and bloodshot, and there was a mouse tail wriggling out from the side of his beak. “This here’s dinner.”
    “Appetizing,” Mallory muttered. She flipped the menu open. The inside was perfectly identical to the inside of the breakfast menu, with the same item listed: Nite-Owl Waffles with Field Mouse Syrup. She looked quizzically up at Trudy. “Is this a joke?”
    “Come again?”
    “Where’s the rest?”
    “The rest of what?” Trudy asked.
    “The menu…where’s the rest of the menu? You know—bacon, hash browns? Steak? Club sandwiches with stupid little toothpicks?”
    Trudy put her fists on her hips. “You don’t like waffles?” The other patrons put down their forks and turned to stare once more.
    “No—I do,” Mallory said. Then she said it again, louder, so everyone else in the diner could hear. “Really, I do!” They turned slowly back to their plates and resumed eating their waffles. “It’s just that…is it all you serve?”
    Trudy shrugged. “We tried adding eggs and grits back in ’93. It ended badly.”
    “How can eggs end badly?” Mallory asked.
    Trudy sighed. “Ask the seventeen folks who died that day.”
    Mallory squinted suspiciously across the counter. “Seventeen people died because you served eggs?”
    “We don’t talk about it with strangers, Trudy,” snapped the man at the other end of the counter. He glared at Mallory until she was sure his pupils would burst into flame.
    Trudy leaned in close. “One of ‘em was Rolly’s brother. He gets real touchy about it. Matter of fact, he’s the one led the charge to kill every chicken in the township the very next day.”
    “ What? ”
    Trudy nodded. “Every single one. Killed ‘em for what their offspring did to our friends and family. To this day, you won’t find a single chicken in Anomaly Flats. If you do, it’s an illegal, and you can bet on the body count going up, up, up until someone finds it and breaks its neck.”
    “Wait, how…” Mallory began.
    Trudy pushed on. “Mob tried to burn down the diner, too, like I knew what the eggs’d get up to! Hell, I ain’t even sure it weren’t the grits that done those people in. But it was a bloodbath, you know, and people, when things go sour, they want revenge. The mayor stepped in, though, thank the Lord, said wouldn’t no one be burning down the Nite-Owl Diner, home of the best waffles in the quad-counties.” Trudy clasped her hands in front of her throat and beamed up at the general direction of the Lord. “The mayor loves my waffles something fierce.”
    An uncomfortable blanket of itchy-wool silence settled on the diner. The patrons stared at Mallory, and Trudy stared at the air, and Mallory stared down at her menu. “So it’s just the waffles, then.”
    “No one complains much.”
    “’Cept you,” Rolly chipped in sourly.
    Mallory shook her head at the two different menus. “Seems like you could’ve saved on printing,” she pointed out.
    Trudy cleared her throat and crossed her arms. “Do you want the waffles or don’t you?”
    Mallory sighed. In spite of her protest—and undeniable weirdness of this place aside—she was hungry, and, as a general rule, she did like waffles. She wasn’t a monster.
    “All right,” she conceded. “Hit me.”
    Trudy knocked on the wall above a square opening that led to the kitchen. “Blue plate!” she hollered to whoever was manning the griddle in the back. She glanced over her shoulder and considered Mallory for a few moments before adding, “Hold the extras.”
    “What extras?” Mallory asked. But either Trudy didn’t hear her, or she just ignored the question, and she swished out from behind the counter instead to check on the customers at the tables.
    Mallory propped her elbows on the