Author Lorrie Moore once said, “A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage.” With Sunday Shorts, OprahMag.com invites you to join our own love affair with short fiction by reading original stories from some of our favorite writers.
Despite its short length, Dantiel W. Moniz's short story—a juicy piece of flash fiction—is a whole meal. It's like ceviche, or tuna tartare, a tasty morsel to be devoured ravenously, one that both slakes your hunger and makes you startlingly aware of that hunger.
Taken from her debut collection Milk Blood Heat, "Exotics" centers on a cadre of waiters serving an uber-wealthy clientele of masked men and women whose appetites become increasingly strange (and...well, depraved—but no spoilers). The short story takes the excuse, "I was just doing my job," to its darkest and most unnerving ends. By working at the Supper Club, the waiters perpetuate their employers' craven desires. At the same time, they're at the bottom rung of an unequal system. Is this what it takes to survive in it?
Prepare yourself: The ending of this story has an image that you won't be able to forget, even if you wanted to.
"Exotics"
Among themselves, the members called it the Supper Club; to us it was only our J-O-B, and no one, not them or us, spoke of it outside of the building’s walls. Concealed in the center of the city in a plain, tan-brick building that could have been the dentist’s or the tax attorney’s office, the club was exclusive in the way that too much money made things. We couldn’t have joined—not that we wanted to, we often said. Even if our fathers had handed us riches from their fathers and their grandfathers before them, made off of the lives and deaths of black and brown bodies, none of us would want to be complicit in such terrible opulence; we only swept up the place.
We took the jobs. Of course we took the jobs. We were citizens with citizens’ needs: food and housing and medical care. Our children wanted and we desired they be allowed their want, that they sometimes have it satisfied. We didn’t ask for much, much less than the members themselves, only that we might afford to be human, and in this way, the pay, cash in hand, was hard to beat.
Once a month, the members gathered in the night, wearing elaborate half-face masks in the likenesses of pigs and dogs and cats that hid their eyes but left their mouths free. While we poured tart cherry mead, fetched fresh cloth napkins, procured new spoons for ones that had fallen, we observed them: a walrus tipping back raw oysters; a big-eyed cow knifing marmalade onto toast; a peacock shimmering in a gold dress, sloshing pink champagne onto the floor. We cleaned it up. We swept crumbs from the linen. We cleared plates between courses and some of us might have drawn our fingers through ribbons of decorative sauce or nudged unbitten nibbles into the palms of our hands. If we caught one another doing so, we pretended that we hadn’t. At every dinner, our faces were bare; the members wanted to know us, though they pretended we had no power. We didn’t know that we did. They conversed around us as if speaking through air, and we came to know most intimately what they thought about the world. One night, over fugu ceviche, a jackal said: The Revolution was never about freedom. We just wanted more kings.
They were the kings, so they laughed.
The Supper Club specialized in exotic meats—the dining table raised on a platform, the eating itself the art. The members devoured main courses of stuffed gator over dirty rice, emu in raspberry sauce, anaconda slivered into hearty stew, and slabs of roasted lion they joked came direct from Pride Rock. They declared ortolan passé, though once we witnessed the tiny bodies disappear beneath the further shroud of napkins, and through their wet smacking, heard the crunch of delicate skulls. They were jeweled animals eating lesser animals, and to each other, with our eyes, we communicated our disgust. We did not prepare the food or choose it. Of course, we served them; we did only our jobs. We fed our children and kept the roofs above their heads. We watched the members gorge themselves in January, February, March and April and May. We collected our unmarked envelopes as they licked extravagant gravy from their fingers.
In November the members cried, Next month must be the rarest! Bigger, better! We deserve! Their mouths always watering for the next meal before they’d finished the last. A panda draped her arm across the gilded chair of a buffalo, her husband, and said, For Christmas let’s have something truly special. Maybe the last of something, and us the only ones to taste.
On the night of the last supper, while we set the table with crystal stemware and festooned mistletoe above the archways, we heard the sleepy cries from the kitchen, the shh-shhshing of the chefs. We heard the lullabies, ones that had been sung to us and that we now sang, the melodies cleaving down to our bones. We were angry! Of course we were. We didn’t want this. We didn’t condone it—but what could we do? We brought the dishes to the table to gasps of nearly erotic anticipation and stepped back and dropped our eyes. If we didn’t look, we could still pretend. Their silverware filled the room with music.
My God, we heard a canary say quietly to a sheep, her hands at her mouth. We knew, if they could, they’d eat Him, too.
And afterward, once the floors were clean, the table stripped, the dishes washed and the cutlery polished, once it seemed that the club had never been, we stood in line for our money. As a bonus, a nod to the year of our dedicated service, each of us was given a white bag as we left by the back door. Merry Christmas, the chefs said. Bon appétit. We took the bags; we tucked them under our coats. None of us spoke. What could we say? In the parking lot, stepping into our used cars, avoiding each other’s eyes, we shrugged. We excused ourselves. Anyway, we might have thought, haven’t we always eaten the young?
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Dantiel W. Moniz is the author of the debut collection Milk Blood Heat, forthcoming in February from Grove Atlantic. She lives in Northeast Florida.
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