I Hear They Eat Sadness

Every two weeks, you go to a different Taco Bell location in New York City after work and order thirty one-dollar bean burritos. 

“That’ll be, uh, thirty-two dollars and forty cents,” the cashier says. She’s trying to keep her face neutral, but you can see the corner of her lip trembling, holding back a smirk.

You hand over your debit card and pretend that this is all completely normal. It’s none of their concern why you are buying enough fast food for a football team. You’re giving them money, and they’re giving you burritos. This is their business model. 

It takes a while to prepare thirty burritos; they don’t even have that many under the heat lamps. While you wait, you unfold two reusable tote bags and set them up matter-of-factly on the counter. On the other side, the cashier and another employee murmur together in the opposite corner, casting their eyes briefly your way. 

A third employee, a dark-skinned guy about your age, places your tacos inside the tote bags. “So, you having a party?” 

You laugh. Depends on who for. You hoist the bags onto your shoulders. The cheap nylon straps dig into your flesh. You will be sore tomorrow; you always are.

“It’s a long story,” you say instead.

When you walk in your apartment door, it’s go time. Your  arrival routine is like something out of an NFL playbook.  A Seal Team Six operation. A stage musical’s grand finale. 

You put the burrito totes on top of the dining table. Purse, shoes, coat go into separate giant plastic bags, sealed airtight like Thanksgiving leftovers. Work clothes, in their own bags: one for things to wash, one for things to re-wear. You change into shorts and a t-shirt right there in the kitchen, which would be weirder if there were more than three feet between the kitchen part of the apartment and the bedroom part of the apartment. (It’s still weird.)

When all the bags are sealed up—the referee whistle blown, the helicopter flown away, the lights lowered down—you can let out the breath you’ve been holding. You stretch your limbs and shake the adrenaline from your skin. 

There is  just one more thing to do before you can really relax for the night. You unpack the burritos and line them up in your fridge, all stacked neatly in a little mass-produced Tex-Mex pyramid on the empty middle shelf. 

All except two. Those you take to a clearing in your studio’s main room. On a patch of bare parquet floor, you crouch down and unwrap the burritos. You set them face up, only the thin waxed paper wrapping separating the food from the ground.

You won’t  need them until later, when you’ll turn out the lights. But it’s good to take care of important things as soon as you think of them, so you don’t forget.

You stand up: a victory lap, a debrief, a curtain call. You head back to the kitchen to make yourself dinner. Pasta, maybe, with a head of garlic sauteéd on the stovetop, to crowd out the smell of cold reheated refried bean burrito. 

Who are you kidding. You’ll have that smell sitting in your nostrils until the day you die.

***

It hasn’t always been like this. At first, it was fun to live here.

You moved to New York in a heat wave summer. The pavement sizzled, but the city wrapped you in a warm hug as you traveled to and from your tiny media company office. The subway was a twisting adventure. The walks along the crowded streets and along tree-lined avenues of old style townhouses soothed and inspired. 

Then, slowly, you lost the feeling. Your stomach rumbled for meals that you’d only get to eat at the end of a long commute, after an even longer day. Your shoulders ached from the weight of your purse. Your feet bled from your smart work shoes, pushed past their limits.

One morning, you woke to find glittery trails climbing up your walls and onto the ceiling over your bed. You knew what it was; you’d been ignoring the signs for weeks. You were tired, you were sad—but you told yourself that was just par for the course, moving to a new place and doing new things. Your skin ached on your wrists—but that was nothing to worry about, just irritation from carrying cheap tote bags full of groceries up five flights of stairs. There was a light layer of shimmering dust on your pillows— probably just makeup you didn’t wash off properly.

But you’d heard the rumors, everywhere. Women whispered about it over the burble of bathroom sinks. Friends laughed it off in clusters at happy hour bars. It was tweeted, Facebooked, Reddited, even New York Post-ed. An infestation. A plague. 

They were invisible creatures, most said. The only sign that they’d been there were the trails they left, iridescent lines on sheets and walls. That, and the side effects on the body. People went to bed sad and woke up depressed. They went to bed tired and woke up exhausted. Though others said that, if they stayed up late, in the dark, with a black light, they’d see them: little blue creatures, like slugs lit with neon from within.

The first thing you did, when you came to terms with the sinking feeling in your chest, was frantically google. No one knew what to make of the creatures. They infested whole buildings, burrowed inside walls and within the cracks of hardwood floors. People online called them succubi, because they fed on humans at night. I hear they eat sadness, one woman commented, which you thought was hilarious. No wonder this place had such a problem. Mythologists of Twitter hated that, because the succubi of legend were women, proto-femme fatales, sex demons. It was incorrect, they said, and also problematic. But it stuck. 

As they advised on Reddit’s succubi advice forum (r/Succubi), you called your landlord to arrange an extermination. You hid in an empty office at work and whispered everything nervously, like you were confessing reading erotica to a priest. But the landlord just laughed. “Don’t believe everything you read on the internet, sweetheart,” he said. 

And so, as in everything from the past few months, you were on your own. 

Of course, you weren’t truly on your own. You had your new friends from the discussion board. They didn’t help assuage your panic, but at least you could panic together. They swore that succubi were highly contagious, clinging onto everything you owned. You spent all of her available disposable income washing and drycleaning all your clothes, securing them in big Ziplocs you bought in bulk on Amazon. 

Decontaminating everything else was trickier. Some people used sage, burning it in the air and sprinkling it around for good measure. You tried that, but it mostly made your apartment and belongings smell like you’d burned dinner. Others sprinkled salt around in the cracks and crevices of the homes, drawing a thick ring in salt around their beds.

You tried that, too. You still woke tired, and sad, and caked in that same glittery dust. 

I’ve resigned myself to just having to live like this until I can move out and get all new stuff, you wrote on the message board. You created your battle plans for coming and going from your apartment. You practiced your choreography for doing laundry and packing your bag each morning for work. You mastered each athletic play of showering and dressing and running through the apartment without touching any furniture. If I’m in motion, you thought, they won’t be able to hitch a ride with me out of this apartment. This had no basis in fact, but none of this really did. It was all held together with intuition and magic and belief.

At night, in the hours after dinner and before bed, you sat on your tiny couch and stared around at the absurdity of your life. Everything encased in blue plastic. Footprints in leftover salt crisscrossing the floor. Gone were your dreams of dinner parties among houseplants and thrifted decor. All you had were late-night Reddit threads about invisible slug demons with other exasperated urbanites from all over the world.

Then one night, a suggestion popped up on your home screen. 

Listen, this doesn’t make any sense, but I left out some Taco Bell by accident overnight and when I woke up, it was all eaten and I felt fucking amazing. 

Tacos? That’s ridiculous. 

Not TACOS. Taco Bell. Seriously. Try it.

You tried it, of course. You’d  try anything to wake up rested and feeling like a normal person. You left out tacos, gorditas, chalupas—everything. 

It worked. It worked every time. You upvoted the hell out of every post on that Reddit thread in extreme gratitude, serotonin coursing through your veins. This is the best sleep I’ve had all year, you wrote.

The succubi weren’t picky. You could just raid the dollar menu and skip the gourmet double-stuffed, double-cheese-layer options. It worked out that two $1 burritos a night kept the succubi away just as well. You started with a Taco Bell in your neighborhood, but then they learned your name, and so your shame drove you to try different ones so people didn’t recognize you as that weirdo who bought out all their burritos.Was there a legend brewing among the city’s Taco Bell employees, you wondered, of a five-foot blonde white girl with a crazy look in her eyes, buying two tote bags’ worth of burritos at a time? Maybe there were legions of them, sad girls buying Taco Bell out of their burritos to stave off amorphous vampire slugs. At any rate, the staff surely has seen much weirder things. Last week you saw a man openly taking a shit in the middle of the street.

***

What is it about Taco Bell? Most of the time, you sink back into your pillows and you do not care. Other times, you marvel at the empty wrappers on the floor each morning, and you can think of nothing else. 

I hear they eat sadness, that woman had written. Is this food all forged in sadness? Is that the big secret to success?  One night you take out one of the backup burritos from your fridge, pop it in the microwave, and take a huge bite.

It doesn’t taste like sadness. It tastes like nostalgia, like joy, like guilt, like rage. It tastes like crawling under a duvet in bed and listening to the rain. It tastes like a nap in the sun.

You wash the burrito traces from your face and your hands when you are done, to keep yourself free of contagion. You swish your mouth out with water, too, just in case any lingered there, too. In the morning, you clear away the Taco Bell wrappers from the floor, where your invisible roommates feasted the night away on all those feelings, packed into a tube of refried beans and flour. You decide not to overthink it. Don’t look a gift taco in the mouth.

***

June comes again. Your lease is ending and you rejoice. You’ll finally be free. You rent a tiny, tiny, tiny studio in a different neighborhood, closer to a park. It has freshly painted white cabinets and the landlord says you can have a cat. You have a good feeling about this place. No succubi in residence. Everyone in the building smiles at you. You will never have to set foot in a Taco Bell again. 

You hire a self-proclaimed shaman off the Internet. He comes highly recommended from three users on your succubi forum. The day you plan to move out, he stands among your big ziplocs and furniture and cardboard boxes in a Ramones t-shirt, waves his hands and chants over crystals. He’ll come by next week to do the same to your new place, too.

Movers come to take your things early the next morning. They nod knowingly at each other as they eye the plastic bags and sniff the Taco Bell scent in the air. They’ve seen it all before. 

You cast your eyes around the empty apartment once they’ve gone. You remember when you last saw it like this, and feel a pang of sorrow for the innocent girl who first moved in. You had no idea what you’d be in for, kiddo.

You go through your routine one last time, in reverse. On the empty floor, you leave  a pile of Taco Bell—burritos, nachos, the whole gamut of Tex-Mex. Eat your heart out, friends. You change into clean clothes you’ve stored alongside your purse for this last escape. You’ll throw out the ones you're wearing, along with the worn-out old ziploc, on your way to the subway. You’re taking no chances.

You lock the door and run down the stairs, out into the fresh light of mid-morning. You look up at the building, your window open, devoid of the curtains that used to blow in the breeze. 

As you walk away, you think that you smell it on the wind, following you up the block. Cheese and refried beans and flour tortillas. The scent of Taco Bell; the scent of this whole year. Years from now, when you wander down the city streets, lights buzzy around you in a cocktail-special haze, you’ll see the cartoon bell sign on high, and you’ll smile and cringe all at once.

“God, I could really go for some Taco Bell,” your drunk friend will say. “I haven’t been to one of those in years!” 

You will laugh, keep walking, shake your head absolutely not.

“Me either,” she’ll reply, “and I’d really like to keep it that way.” 

But, a little bit, in the back of your mind, you think you might be tempted. You remember that night at the sink. One bite. The rage. The guilt. The joy. The warmth. 

Most of all, the warmth. Once you’ve had it, it’s hard to forget.

Caelyn Cobb is a university press editor living in Queens, NY. Her writing has appeared in Longleaf Review, The Dream Journal, and other places on the internet. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram at @caelyncobb.