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It was nine o’clock in the morning at Nasty’s Grocer and Deli, and Larry the Sandwich was having a day. He flopped down on the ground, splaying his tiny sticklike legs wide on the linoleum, and let out a huff of a sigh. “You ever think about life, Dave?” he asked, throwing it over what once had probably been his shoulder, but was now just a bit of crust.
Dave, who was a preternaturally large swirly lollipop of debatable sentience Larry had found out near the produce aisle last week, emitted a sort of strangled yelp and smacked his disturbingly human lips.
The guy was nice enough, honestly, but the whole ‘communicating only through screams’ shtick did get a bit old after a while.
Larry sighed again, and leaned back into the closest object, which just so happened to be the shelf behind him. “I used to be human, y’know,” he told Dave conspiratorially. “Got the whole shebang – arms, real legs, a torso. And then, boom!” For lack of a working pair of hands, he settled for smacking his heels together, making Dave jump. “Alcor the freakin’ Dreambender waltzes in and makes me a sandwich.”
Balancing precariously on his little white stick, Dave pogo-sticked a few bounces closer and shrieked sympathetically. A little ways down the aisle, a rather frail-looking woman – one of Nasty’s regulars that Larry fondly referred to in the privacy of his own head as Nicotine Nancy – stopped in her tracks, stared at the both of them for a minute, then abruptly walked right back out of the aisle.
“Don’t get me wrong, friend-o, I don’t miss it.” Larry attempted a motion that likely would’ve resembled a headshake, had he possessed a head to begin with. “Bein’ human ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. You ever had some rando broad with a stroller slide up to you in line at the Mickey D’s and just start screamin’ at you to start takin’ responsibility for your family? Like, lady, the most I ever did to you was deliver your mail a bit late on Saturday that one time, and last I checked, that ain’t exactly a crime.”
Dave, who had begun gnawing on the seam of an expired bag of candy corn he’d found on the bottom shelf, yowled, but the effect was somewhat lost due to the excessive amount of plastic in his mouth.
“I know!” Larry flopped his legs about dramatically, to gesticulate exactly how much and to what extent he knew about the situation. “And between you and me, it wasn’t even a baby neither – she’d just dolled up her poor bastard chihuahua in drag.”
Dave didn’t dignify this little insight with a response, screamed or otherwise. His dull yellow teeth had finally managed to pierce the flimsy plastic coating around the candy corn and he was lost to his own personal sugar-infused state of bliss.
Larry nudged him with his foot. Dave kept chewing. “Now, I don’t gotta worry about shit like that here,” he told him, settling back into the shelf. “I mean, imagine trying to sue a sandwich for child support.” He paused for a minute appreciatively, allowing Dave ample time to imagine this scenario in vivid detail. “The judge would laugh you outta the courtroom! Your lawyer’d never work again! S’genius!”
Dave chewed slower, as if trying to impart precisely how low of an opinion he had of Larry in that moment. Some of this was lost due to the fact that, for Dave, ‘chewing slower’ meant swallowing down food at Mach 7 instead of his usual Mach 8.
Being the less-than-perceptive fellow that he was, Larry remained ignorant to the subtle machinations of Dave's mind. He was far more responsive, however, to the whap upside the head Dave served him two seconds later. He sighed. “Okay, I was lying. She never really sued me for child support. I was just messin’ with you.”
A beat. Dave stared him down unblinkingly, something that he was incredibly good at, given he had no eyes to blink with.
Once again, Larry broke. “Fine, she was actually kinda nice too. Y’know, for a broad. Took me out for coffee and everything. She was one of those ‘face-blind’ types – thought I was her ex-boyfriend.” He stared into the middle distance for a moment, something that was complicated somewhat by the fact that he, like Dave, was also fairly devoid of eyes.
His lettuce fluttered as the AC vent under the shelf behind him shuddered back to life, and he took this as his cue and got back up to his feet. “I miss coffee,” he told Dave, as if this was a secret, and not a statement he uttered an average of 54 times per day. “But I didn’t have attack bologna back then neither, so I guess it evens out.”
Dave shrieked, then abandoned his candy corn to bounce back over to Larry.
“Yeah, yeah,” Larry muttered. “Wanna go screw around with the owner again? Make him think the store’s haunted?”
The noise Dave emitted, on the scale of screams, lay perfectly equidistant between “blood-curdling shriek of a child being fed through a paper shredder” and “Homer Simpson stubbing his toe.”
If Larry had had a mouth, he would’ve grinned. “Sick.”