One of the demons opens its cloak a little over the belly to illustrate a point and the spaghetti girl spots a spaghetti strand dangling inside. She grabs the spaghetti and starts to slurp it up toward herself. Venke claps her hands. Skin jiggles with every smack of her hands.
The girl slurps up more and more spaghetti. It turns out the body and head of this demon are made entirely of spaghetti, and it slowly begins to unravel. In the end, the cloak is the only thing left on the chair. The girl devours the last strand of pasta, and happily continues to eat what’s left on her own plate. As if the demonic spaghetti isn’t real food, but satisfies some other need.
The other guests start looking more closely at the new arrivals, every one of whom is now anxious and attempts to withdraw. We begin to find food scraps on the demons’ bodies, and slowly devour them, every last one, in a feast that looks more and more like a brawl. The demons are made of liquorice and cocoa powder, gingersnaps and celery, artichokes, cocktail berries and pineapple rings.
I study the demon that kept its face concealed under its cloak and slowly reach my hand toward the hood, pulling it down. A face appears underneath the fabric, or an inverted face, like HR Giger’s facehugger, that big insect larva that wraps arms and tentacles round and into the human face, covering the outside like a hand. Carefully, I sink my teeth into it. It’s soft and a little viscous. I hear a faint squeal coming from inside it, and I take my first bite of a demon. It coats my mouth like a kind of gruel or almond custard. Venke and Terese and several more people stand up and approach me and together we bite, slurp and lap it all up. Under the gruel facehugger’s spine, a half-finished screaming face is revealed, made of hardened chocolate sauce. We eat this face too. Some dip their fingers, or a strawberry or a pineapple ring in the sauce, while I lick and suck and slurp up the face, feeling it slide down my belly like a long, warm tentacle.
Now they’re all gone. That’s that.
Terese is sitting on the floor under the table, where she has found one final dessert. A marzipan sausage. It’s sliced and distributed around the table. We enjoy it slowly, already full and content.
One of us grabs three leftover spaghetti strands from a platter and forms a circle with each of them, like three snakes biting their own tails. Then she shifts the three rings so they partly cover each other, overlapping, like three occult Olympic rings, like the way we overlap each other, with legs, arms and chocolate sauce shared between us.
We doze lightly on our chairs and on the floor. I dip my hand in a blotch of chocolate sauce on the seat of a chair and draw shapes on the seat cover. Venke has taken out two bags and positioned herself at the end of the table. She removes red rubber gloves from one bag and puts them on, then she sticks her hand in the other. Her hand rummages through the bag. The rest of us sit up and watch. A few people start to giggle. Venke retracts the gloved hand. She’s got something brown and soft in her fist. Is it even more food, custard, fondant, or is it faeces? She turns and throws the thing at the wall behind her, the one with the petrified students behind it.
Is it shit? someone yells.
Is it? Venke asks in return. Or is it mud? Is it chocolate?
The rest of us squeal with joy.
If it’s shit, someone else says, then it’s ours. Our waste! Human antimatter! We’ve got to make something with it.
Venke holds the bag up and hands out rubber gloves. Some of us put on gloves and hesitatingly start poking their hands into the shit. It might be chocolate. More squealing.
Then everyone start flinging poo around, first cautiously, then more and more wildly, at the walls and at the canvas, like a pillow fight. The mood is warm and friendly, the pitches euphoric.
The effect of the chocolate, or faeces, grows greater and more powerful, clearer, as if it’s sedated us, or we’ve crossed some boundary. As if we’re taking part in a role-play in which our real personalities are increasingly concealed, literally and metaphorically, by all the shit. Fact and fiction are snogging. We’ve used hallucinations for paint, and stand on the other side of the mirror, where the students could have peered over at us, were they not stuck in time. We’ve opened up this space and stepped over into delirium, a ritual where everything can happen. We’re glued together by the faeces, like one long coiled-up snake that licks every one of its orifices, content and lazy.
A distant SMS ding is heard. Slowly the clogged room opens up again, and that one second out there in reality has become the next. It’s time to leave.
Someone is pushing the painted glass walls towards each other, we get closer and closer, as the space narrows between the room in the room and the time in the time. Finally we have to head off, out, and we discover that we’re no longer dirty and full, that we’re no longer smeared with brown gunk. We quickly disappear from the school, in every direction, just as mysteriously as we arrived. As I exit, I hear a backward SCREECH, as if someone has lifted the needle off a spinning LP, and suddenly I’m alone. I text Venke and Terese but don’t get a reply until much later, as if we’ve been scattered into different years on our way back to our own time and can’t reach each other.
I’m not sure the ritual itself ended in erasure, as if it never happened, or if it made itself invisible by some enchantment, and is still happening
