Midway through my shoveling shift at Nuth-Shoggoth, there’s a tap on my shoulder. It’s Sid, the host. It takes me a second to come back to myself: A few hours of shoveling and you zone out. I stand there blinking at Sid, the front of my work shirt a pink mess of meat stains, my hands dripping with blood from the entire hog’s head I just tossed into the Shoggoth’s maw.

“What?”

Sid winces at the state of my uniform. “Go change,” he says, “We’re getting a rush from the show downtown and Lazaro’s not coming in today.”

“Is he sick?” I ask, my hands still hanging in front of me, fingers spread so they don’t stick together.

Sid shakes his head. “He got jumped last night walking home. He’s in the hospital.”

“Shit … Is it a server assist shift?”

“Nope, runner.”

Damn it, I think. Runners get tipped out, which shovelers don’t, but it’s half the server’s assistant rate. The work is hell on the wrists and feet. Worse than shoveling, physically. Not that I’d rather be a server—swallowing the psychic shit of the most entitled guests night after night is really just its own kind of shoveling. Unbelievable tipout, though. Anyway, it could be worse—I could be on scraping.

I sigh, and go wash my hands in the big scaly sink. The walls breathe as water pumps from the bony spigot in warm bursts. Clots of pig’s blood slip down the drain like slugs.

I follow Sid out of the kitchen chamber; he’s wearing one of his usual getups—tweed vest, black dress shirt, bolo tie with a scorpion. He keeps a tiny antique comb in his breast pocket; in slow moments at the host stand he uses it to brush his thin strawberry blond mustache. We weave through the toadstool-field of tables in the main section, the fleshy ribs of the ceiling glistening high overhead. We push through the already-crowded front section, popular because of the view—we’re about three stories up, inside where the Shoggoth’s head would be if it had a head. We pass a curlicuing STAFF ONLY sign, not painted, but cultivated, on the wall, then go through a series of curtain-like membranes that quiver as they brush our shoulders.

In the changing room, lit by bioluminescent orbs that dangle from the ceiling, Sid hands me one of the Punishment Shirts and a Tie of Shame from the rack of loaner clothes. The shirt is cheap stretchy polyester, stiff at the pits from sweat stains, and it sticks to my blood-damp torso. I get to keep my same pants on—they’re black, so the mess doesn’t show, especially in the dim light of the restaurant.

The rest of the night I do the bare minimum. Spacing out gets me in trouble only once, when I run a scalding plate of Linguini con Ambrosia to a table that ordered Ambrosia Carbonara, and the guests throw a fit that only free Salted Tres Leches Ice Cream Over Ambrosia can solve.

The bus is late that night, like always. I stand in the cold of the Shoggoth Loop clutching a greasy bundle of work clothes to my chest. A guy chats me up while I wait, which isn’t unusual. He’s about fifty. I can tell he’s trying to figure out my whole gender deal, and I don’t drop any clues.

He’s old enough to remember the Loop before the Masters came and abandoned their Shoggoths on our plane of existence. Before we found the Runestones to control them, herded them into their designated districts and put them to use. Before the first New York Times piece on Ambrosia cuisine.

The guy points a crooked finger down the rubble-lined street. “See that place down there?” All over the Loop lights blink on and off randomly. Streetlights from old infrastructure, headlights on the husks of antique cars, fluorescent tubes in the ruins of office buildings and parking garages, like a field of fireflies.

These specific blinking lights frame the remnants of an old vertical sign sticking out from a partly-collapsed building. All that’s left is an apostrophe-S. “Rayon’s,” says the old-timer. “I used to go down there, before you was born, I bet. They had a dope house band. The Combo. I’d go there, get real drunk, meet nice girls.” He gets a faraway look. “Real nice …”

I think about that kid from the East City, the one who brought the world the news about Ambrosia. That kid would be old enough to drink now. All of his friends would be too, if any of them had made it.

“When the aliens came,” says the guy, “Me and the boys on my block got together, got prepared, tried to stop them.”

“Really?” I say.

He nods, sad. “State pigs and the National Guard got there first. Flash-banged and tear gassed us, said we were ‘interfering’. And now … no more Rayon’s.”

The old guy gives me another once-over, a casual blessing, then slumps off into the night. The bus comes finally. It takes forever to get through the decontamination checkpoint at the barricades, so I don’t get home till three. I fall asleep thinking about how none of our guests have to go through decon, how little sense that makes.

When I get in the next day, Lazaro’s still out, and I’m on assist for the server he usually works with, Melissa. She has two adult children, cat’s eye glasses, and an NPR sticker on her car. I like working with her because she asks for what she needs, refills waters herself, and doesn’t take stuff out on the support staff—at least not directly. She does think all our tipout rates should get decreased, which is something I know because it’s an axe she grinds when she gets buzzed on prosecco after her shift. She’s taking up a collection for Lazaro’s hospital bill. I ask if she knows how Lazaro is, and she says, “Jasen heard he’ll be OK but he lost a couple of teeth.” While I’m folding napkins for pre-shift I overhear Shane, the manager, emerge from her office and pull a couple of the runners into the dish pit. Scraping shift. Terrible.

You never want to get stuck on scraping. Ambrosia fresh out of the glands is light and fluffy, its texture somewhere between moist angel food cake and cream of wheat. But give it an hour or so to cool and congeal, and it’s superglue. No conventional dishwasher, no man-made scrubber, can even put a dent in it. The only thing that can handle it is the Shoggoth’s own enzymes. So on a scraper shift, you get handed plate after plate, which you have to shove through the predigestive pores and rub against the steel-wool-like internal cilia, and yank out again. The predigestive enzyme is caustic and it reeks, and management provides a single pair of protective gloves per shift. The guys who have been scrapers a long time—like Eduardo and Hernan—give you shit if you even use the gloves. They have a toxic masculinity thing about it; they make a lot of condom-related jokes whenever you get stuck on scraping support and you wear them. Me, I wear the gloves. The enzyme smell still takes a week to wash out. Selma, who wears gloves but scrapes dishes four nights a week, has lost her fingerprints entirely.

The “host stand” is a narrow shaft of calcified Shoggoth flesh growing straight out of the floor. It has a little drawer in it. When I pass it carrying a tray of glasses, Sid motions me over.

“Psst. You missed pre-shift,” he says.

“I know,” I say, “I’m sorry. The bus was late again.”

He reaches out and fixes my tie. It feels surprisingly intimate, but I can tell the gesture’s not about me.

“The Molnads are coming in tonight. They’ll be at table eighteen—your section. So uh, don’t drop anything and make sure Chef knows when they get here.”

The Molnads are the local big-money family that wound up with a lot of Runestones after the Masters came and went. They own Nuth-Shoggoth; not just the restaurant, but the whole city-block-sized creature the restaurant is nestled inside. They own most of the Shoggoths in the Loop, with and without restaurants. It’s bad enough when the restaurant directors come in during a shift, but these guys, the Keepers, are even worse. “Keepers,” in case you don’t spend your workdays ensconced in a giant creature from beyond, is what the uber-wealthy started calling themselves after they seized the Runestones and took control of said creatures. The Molnads, Nuth-Shoggoth’s Keepers, are usually sloshed by the time they arrive, belligerent and ready to complain. They always order shit that’s not on the menu, usually a lot of it.

“Ugh. Can I be on shoveling tonight instead?” I say.

Sid says, “You wish.”

I should have been careful what I wished for. Selena, one of the shovelers tonight, cuts her hand on a buccal spur. Getting any amount of human blood in the Shoggoth’s maw is verboten. So I end up zipping back and forth between front-of-house and back-of-house, whipping on an apron to pour buckets of grade-A wagyu beef and raw organ meat into the maw, then scrubbing my hands and tearing off the apron to run steaming dishes of Ambrosia to the Molnads. Flesh in, Ambrosia out; that’s the Shoggoth exchange. It’s inefficient. Something like sixty grams of raw meat per gram of delicious mush, which is why Ambrosia is so expensive.

The Molnads are drunker than usual, and amped up on some stimulant besides. Getting plates onto their table is like a fencing match between me and their flailing arms and jerking heads, while they brag to each other about their latest travels and business deals, completely oblivious to my existence. But I manage; I’m a pro at this now. They take single bites of each dish before demanding new rounds of entrees; they want to be seen ordering, but they don’t care what they’re eating. We could be running them plates of unsalted cornmeal and they’d keep ordering plate after plate, as long as it cost a fortune and everyone in the restaurant knew it. Same with the wine they keep ordering, brought forth from a slime-cooled cavity in back, destined for the dump hole in the kitchen.

Back and forth. Dodging the Molnads; feeding the maw. The maw keeps on swallowing; the glands on the line keep extruding mush; the line cooks keep dressing the mush up with cured meat and farm-fresh herbs. Anton, the head chef, says the high-quality animal proteins we feed Nuth-Shoggoth give our Ambrosia a “heady nuttiness” that sets us apart from the other Shoggoth restaurants in the Loop. For example, the chef at Slhiiv-Shoggoth down the block feeds the thing a vegetarian diet, which Anton says makes their Ambrosia thin and mealy and “overly mineral.” I wouldn’t know; I can’t afford to eat at Slhiiv-Shoggoth.

But I have tried the Ambrosia here. Ambrosia is theoretically one of those dare-you-to-try-it foods, like durian, or those fried crickets from museum gift shops. That goes away when you actually get near it, because the smell is unbelievable. You’ve probably heard it described a lot of ways: white wine and honey toast, candied garlic, buttered oyster. Supposedly it smells different to everybody, because scientists say the smell isn’t actually real. Apparently there’s some sort of mild narcotic in it that stimulates the memory and appetite centers of the brain.

And you build up a tolerance, so after you’ve been working in a Shoggoth for a year or so, Ambrosia doesn’t smell—or taste—like anything. Maybe a little like chicken. But your first time, your first few times …

I actually wept, my first time. Right there at the back bar, in front of Chef and the other new hires. I was coming off a bad year, barely snagged this job through a musician friend. It was a phase of feeding myself rice and beans and cereal for the calories, not really tasting anything I ate. But that first taste of Ambrosia made my life in food flash before my eyes: vanilla Gerber pudding out of the little glass jar. Cinnamon rolls at the old bagel shop. Fourth of July, up late for the fireworks, barbeque ribs drowned in root beer. Fresh blackberries off the bush behind the dentist’s office. It was like a chorus went off in my brain, screaming at me Remember! Food tastes good! Life is pleasure! You deserve this! Tears welled up in my eyes and I had to excuse myself. No one else cried, but I could tell they felt it too: this transcendent, revelatory deliciousness.

That’s how they get you.

In the wild, whatever the wild is, Ambrosia is bait. That’s why the glands are close to the maw.

When the Molnads finally leave, the restaurant is mostly empty. It’s quiet enough that you can hear Nuth-Shoggoth breathing, the rumbles and pops of its internal processes. Sid is still there, polishing menus. Hosts come in early and work late. He gives me a bitchy look and then pulls a crisp bill out of his vest pocket. It’s a big bill. “They left this for you,” he says, “They said you did good.”

I stare at the bill. “Wow,” I say, “Thanks. Do you have change?” I decide I’m going to split it evenly with the scrapers.

Sid heads to the bar register. “I think you did good too,” he says.

I can tell the moment of earnestness is physically painful to him, so I just nod and ask if I’m good to go.

“Yep,” he says, “But come in early tomorrow.”

Fuck, I think. “Why?”

“We’re training you on Host.”

After work, I wait a full hour for the bus, practicing something called “vase breathing” that I read about online to stay warm (it doesn’t help). Nobody chats me up tonight, which is almost weird. People from City East wander into the Loop all the time, ignoring the barricades. The Invasion was just the latest in a long line of catastrophes shunted over to the edge of the city for the Easties to deal with, and they couldn’t help but take it in stride. They don’t see a lot of people from other parts of the city anymore, not since the Loop got cordoned off. There’s a lot of Easties working in the Loop, but they mostly keep them in waste and nutrient management. Out of sight.

For a while, after the Masters came, there was shortage after shortage in the big cities. Crops failed all along the river in the runoff from the Shoggoths. Shipping routes were blocked by rubble. An epidemic swept through cows and chickens and pigs. Eggs got more expensive than phones; even rice and beans were gone from the convenience store shelves, hoarded in people’s cellars if they could afford them.

I didn’t grow up in a city, but even I remembered: People were hungry. Especially kids, especially the scrappy ones bold and stupid enough to sneak into a Shoggoth District because they thought they had nothing to lose but their boredom. Those kids who slipped through the barricades years ago came looking for trouble, and found an incredible smell. The survivor said his friends all described it differently: cinnamon rolls, beef hand pies, toasted marshmallows. They followed the smell through the flickering shadows of the Loop, trailed indifferently by the Loop Patrol in their expensive skimmers. They were suddenly all too hungry to speak, the survivor said, too hungry to think clearly. Then they came to Seeq Shoggoth, a mountain of shifting flesh the size of two city blocks, four stories high. Its shoulder was pressed low to the ground, an orifice like a cave yawning in welcome, wave after wave of deliciousness surging over and around them. “Wait!” the survivor remembers calling as they dipped their fingers in the pools of ambrosia bracketing the walls. I saw an interview with him years ago; I forget his name. He said that even after he got out of there, even while the Patrol skimmer headed him off with the screams of his friends behind him, all he could think about was licking his fingers.

Decon goes by quickly tonight—a short line, the masked employee waving their sensor wand past us more symbolically than anything else. The bus crosses through the barricades, getting hit with a few parting paintballs from some neighborhood kids. The driver barely notices, just mutters a sarcastic “Thank you, thank you.”

I get home reasonably early but dog-tired, heat up some ramen in the microwave, and try to focus on a comic for a while. All my roommates are asleep, so it’s just me and the old hissing, gurgling radiator in my little yellow room. She’s OK company. The pair of particleboard storage cubes I use as shoe-shelf, dining table, and desk are piled with collection notices, crumpled small bills from tips, and old show fliers. I haven’t played a show in months. My synth sits in the corner like a kid in trouble, languishing under a layer of dust. Sometime last year I got super overwhelmed trying to juggle band practice and work, and my bandmates got fed up with me not answering their pings, so we’re de facto broken up now. Both of them have parents that pay their rent. Our last show was going to be at a zoo actually, way out in the burbs, but we ended up canceling it because we couldn’t agree on a practice time and I just ghosted the thread. Probably lucky for the animals. I keep telling myself if I can just stick with this job long enough to save up a little money, I’ll start doing solo sets in some basement venues, make some connections again, maybe make an EP—I moved here for the music scene, didn’t I? How long ago was that now? But work takes more and more out of me, lately. And the rent on my place is low, but not that low.

The next day Lazaro comes back finally. His eye is still swollen shut, and leaking tears. He’s missing two teeth, and there’s a stitched-up cut above his brow. He acts big about it, getting a round of cheers when he comes in and bumping fists with everybody, but he’s limping all night. Tonight there’s game hen, cow eyes, and salmon roe going into the maw. The special is Ambrosia with foraged ramps and morels from way outside the city. Everybody gets to try a bite of the special at pre-shift; it reminds me of risotto. Mostly I just taste butter and salt. Lazaro snags a whole morel with his fingers and no one complains.

I’m up at the host stand with Sid now, learning to run the wait list and process gift cards. It’s the first time I’ve been able to wear my own clothes here, and not the uniform. It feels good. I can feel muscles unknotting in my back that have been tense for months, always anticipating the next bucket of offal, the next stack of hot plates, the next snide remark from a stressed-out server or manager. There’s downtime up here, even though you have to come in early, and customers tend to want the host to like them, so they get a “good” table and a “good” server. Plus, the hourly pay is better.

Halfway through the shift they move Lazaro onto shoveling, because Melissa tells Shane he’s moving too slow; and then onto scraping, after he drops a bucket of cow eyes. I run him deli containers of 7Up from the bar between seating rushes. He looks at my outfit—a low cut linen top and a blazer from Marshalls—and says, “Forgot your uniform again?” I point out that he’s got predigestive enzyme dripping down his arm over the gloves. “Oh yeah, that shit burns,” he says, but doesn’t wipe it up. It’s busy right now so it’s a lost cause, I get it.

“I’m training on host tonight,” I say.

“Oh yeah? That’s what’s up.”

I walk back up with Lazaro’s empty container from before, and talk to Sid, who’s double-checking my work on the wait list.

“How come we aren’t training Lazaro on host?” I ask, but we both know the answer. Even before his face got messed up, his appearance and muscle and whole vibe marked him as an Eastie. I’m a transplant, and clean-cut, and androgynous. I look and sound like I belong in fine dining. But I ask anyway, because having seen Lazaro wrist-deep in predigestive pore, with two black eyes and a new gap in his teeth, is wearing on my conscience.

If Sid squirms, it’s all internal. “He’s late a lot,” he says, which is not exactly a lie but definitely a fiction. Lazaro shows up beyond early most days, takes on extra hours with the prep crew and the dishwashers, and then sometimes—sometimes—takes his time getting into uniform and skips pre-shift. We both know this too.

“I think he’d be good at it,” I say, pushing my luck.

“Well, this shift is very close to the bar,” Sid says. “I imagine Shane is concerned about temptation.” Sid’s trying to clown on our absentee manager for being uptight, but it doesn’t land. It just sounds like he’s calling Lazaro a drunk. I give him a look and he gets defensive. “Come on, you think a guy that size gets jumped that bad when he’s sober?”

“Well, he was outnumbered, right?” I say. Sid makes a “hm” sound and we just stand there wiping menus for a while. I gaze out the row of eye-caps that serve as windows. Beneath us, blinking lights illuminate the ruined Industrial Loop. The Shoggoths have some kind of effect on electrical fields, which is why some people working in the Loop get heart conditions, strokes, et cetera over time. Most of us get an eye twitch at least, after a year or two. The view through the eye-caps stretches from Nuth-Shoggoth out to the river, blackened with slime. Other Shoggoths loom among the rubble, like sleeping cows in a field.

“What did you think of the special tonight?” I ask, just to break the silence. “The morel thing.”

Sid doesn’t look up. “Oh, I don’t dine here,” he says.

“But it’s free,” I say back.

He looks at me over the rims of his glasses. “… Where do you think we work?” he says.

“A restaurant?” I say, and the word echoes in the depths of the Look that Sid gives me.

He gestures towards a guy in a suit leaning against the bar. The bar is a promontory of some kind of cartilage. “See that guy? Big finance guy downtown, here every couple nights. And over there? The really serious-looking broad in the booth? Defense contractor. Table seventeen we reserve every Thursday night in case the pharmaceuticals guys come in.”

“You mean the bread guys?” There’s a table of regulars that comes in and always has some problem with the complimentary bread … underbaked, sitting out too long, there’s a stain on the napkin. One of them threw butter at me once.

“Yes, the bread guys,” says Sid. He goes on. “Remember the big party that booked the private cavity on Saturday?”

I remember them. They tried to stack their own dirty plates, it was a disaster.

“Also corporate,” Sid says, “Some kind of manufacturing.”

“You know,” I say, “I am aware of the concept of rich people. It’s distasteful, but I think I handle it OK.”

A glitzy couple walks in, both red and sweaty with wine. He’s about sixty, she’s in her thirties, hanging onto his sleeve by her knuckles. Sid’s face snaps into a welcoming mask as he shows them to a just-wiped two-top. He walks back wearing his regular face, cynical and persnickety; he ignores that I just mouthed off.

“The Molnads,” he says, “didn’t just buy up the Shoggoths for passive income from a bunch of variations on Uncle Anton’s Goop Shack.” He gestures around the dimly lit restaurant. “They get a better ROI on their sports teams and cable stations anyway. This thing we’re in is not just a mush dispenser, you know.”

“No?”

“Well it’s a killing machine, for one thing. People want to forget the invasion, but that happened. It grows back if you cut it to pieces, its whole body can be a brain, and it can synthesize a million different novel biomaterials. This is super hot real estate. The restaurant industry just got in here first, and it’s probably on its way out. I just think you should be aware, you know, since I’m trying to get out of here.”

“You’re quitting?”

“I mean, I hope so. Within a year. You ever want to host full-time?”

I squint at him, trying to imagine him in business casual at some tech firm, or working construction, or ramening himself through grad school. None of it fits. He dresses and carries himself like he’s always been here, like Jack Nicholson in the photo at the end of The Shining. I think about what he’s saying, though; about the times I’ve seen the owners skulking around the service corridors with Business Types. All the unexplained hirings and firings at the management level. How there’s sometimes more cash flowing than makes sense. I think about how this whole restaurant, coaxed by biomagic from flesh, is just one little compartment in a massive living organism, like an ingrown hair on an elephant.

I feel a hand on my shoulder; it’s Lazaro. “Workin’ hard, or hardly workin’?” He smells brackish from scraping. Both his eyes are still black from the fight. But my heart stutters, because his hand is big and he’s touching me.

“Not sure which,” I say.

“They run out of sticky plates in back?” says Sid.

“Yeah, we’re all out of lil bitches too, that’s why I came up here,” says Lazaro.

“Touché,” says Sid.

“Nah, man, just saying hi. It’s lonely back there.”

I watch Sid unclench, just a little bit. I can tell Lazaro sees it too. “Well … hi,” Sid says. He’s doing his best.

Beneath our feet, the Shoggoth clicks and groans. We can just barely hear it, every so often, over the sound of clinking forks and tipsy laughter. The sphincter leading to the kitchen sighs open and closed, and through it I can see Selena pushing a barrel on a hand truck, piled high with dead geese, plucked clean.

Editor: Hebe Stanton

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors