The First Moment
Copyright© 2026 by TMax
Chapter 6: Food
The roar in the room deafened me. We entered an enormous, hundred-person cafeteria, with a large window along the left wall that overlooked the cavern with the alien thing. About fifty or sixty people of every color, race, height, and gender sat, ate, and talked. I had to put my hands over my ears. The smells almost overpowered me. Not as bad as the gross room, but the different spices and scents mixed into something both wonderful and horrible. Gave comfort and triggered memories of home, felt foreign, and made me feel lost.
“Everyone in here was selected, special, plus another hundred fifty or so that are sleeping or training or fucking,” Alice’s voice had a song-like quality, like she sang professionally, or as if she had trained to sing.
“But, what?” I asked as too many thoughts, too many strange things had happened too quickly. I generally did OK with new things. I tried new restaurants and new meals. I bought strange new fruit at the store. I even took up a new sport or exercise every couple of years. I had a child. You learn to adapt quickly with a child. But this. All of this. The alien ship. The trials. Almost dying. Almost killing someone. And now this secret cafeteria, so much like my high school. Just bigger, but also different. Different but similar smells.
Everything caused my head to spin, and I placed my hand out to hold Alice’s, like I would have my wife’s, but her hand didn’t feel like my wife’s. Colder. Rougher. Longer fingers.
“Sit,” Alice gestured to a seat near us. No one else sat at the table. A long table that could seat twelve. Just one table in a long line of tables. Just one row in a dozen or more rows.
The table didn’t have scratches like my high school cafeteria, which made everything ok. Not high school. Something new, but familiar, but enough difference that my sense of myself could grasp the idea, the concept that I sat in someplace new, but someplace that I may belong.
Alice pulled out a grey phone, scanned a bar code on the table, and asked, “What do you want to eat? They make everything.”
Curry scents wafted across the table. Someone who reminded me of my English teacher sat at a nearby table. A Chinese woman, in a beautiful red dress, sat down across from him with a burger and onion rings on her tray. She smiled and nodded at me as our gazes met. I looked to the right of her, as if I just happened to catch her eye.
“Burger and fries,” I said as my stomach growled. Simple. Something simple. Something that Mom ordered for my birthday during my teenage years. A meal that my daughter loved, even if my wife found it too oily. ‘Grease is bad for you,’ she would say as she ate a fast-food salad, and my daughter and I ate our burgers. My daughter would giggle, and I would offer a fry to my wife, which she always ate with a frown.
My cheeks felt hot, and my eyes misted as I tried to focus on the present, on what I needed to do next.
“Fucking American, you can have steak, lobster, caviar, which sucks by the way, basically whatever.” Alice stared at me. I nodded. My sister said almost the same thing last time we went to a nice restaurant. Except substitute lobster and caviar with pasta and seafood.
“Just a cheeseburger and fries,” I said, because just like at that dinner, I needed something familiar, something simple that I didn’t have to think about. A universal meal that, even if they screwed up, could still offer some comfort.
“On it?”
I stared at a massive person in a white coat. His arms waved around as spittle flew from his mouth. His big, bushy black beard had white crumbs in it. A small lady and a small man, also in white lab coats, stood in front of him and shook their heads. They continued the argument, and I almost stood up to intervene when the massive man suddenly stopped, smiled, nodded, and the three of them walked away.
“Fuck dude, what do you want on it?” Alice asked, her face in my face. She wore too much eye shadow, and her breath smelled of mint and garlic, which caused a memory of my wife asking me if her breath smelled, which it did, of garlic, so before we went into the work event, she took a breath mint. Her breath smelled like mint and garlic, although I never told her, and no one noticed.
“Ketchup, mustard, mayo, tomato, lettuce, and onion.”
Alice mumbled something about buns under her breath. A woman with long blonde hair, pretty, with too pale skin, stared. She didn’t blink enough, and her blue eyes shone so much that they looked fake. The man beside her tried to get her attention, explained something using his finger on the table, but while the woman nodded, she kept her gaze on me.
“Fries?”
“Yes.” I thought I said burger and fries. Maybe I just thought it. My headache throbbed in the front while the back felt like someone had squeezed it in a vice. All around us, people ate. Four distinct groups. Normal clothes, or whatever passed for normal in the part of the world the person came from, who talked as normal people did. Some very animated. Some hardly moved their mouths.
The white lab-coated group talked loud. Their conversations filled the cafeteria. The green and black uniformed soldiers ate in silence, as if they needed to conserve their energy for guard duty or an upcoming battle. The last group wore either fancy military uniforms or boring suits. They spoke in small bursts, and they lingered over their food as if they had all the time in the world.
“Dude, didn’t you hear me when I said that you can have anything? They have like a billion fucking fry choices,” Alice grabbed my shoulder and turned me to face her.