He Designed a Menu That Hides Nothing. I Read It Three Times With My Hands in My Lap.

Submitted by, Elias Sterling

checked into, The Corroder of the Unfaithful

Chef Anthony, the mansion's own chef, published his required dinner menu this week, and I have been sitting with it ever since. The cost is one hundred eighty-four thousand dollars for the first course alone. Linguine in a sauce I will not describe in polite terms, though nothing about this purple velvet underground requires politeness. The second course is where he lost me entirely, and I mean that as a compliment. Sounding rods. The man described sounding rods funneling your own body's response over scallops, and the rule is tongues only. You understand what that means. You cannot fake what your body does in that moment. You cannot rehearse it, soften it, or explain it away with a beautifully chosen sentence. The rod is inside you. The scallop is in front of you. The evidence of exactly what you are is trickling down toward a plate. I have spent the better part of my adult life hiding evidence exactly like that. I paid to come here. Paid in advance, specifically because I knew I would find reasons to leave. This menu is Chef Anthony's way of explaining what the money actually bought.

The main course is a man face-down while Mistress Lynne's attention is directed entirely elsewhere, and the dessert is nine men eating with their tongues while three hold a tray across their shoulders and get used from behind simultaneously. If the tray falls, nobody comes. That is not a metaphor. That is a structural rule about how accountability works: you do not get to hide your reaction behind someone else's. Every tremor is public. Every loss of control is shared. I have made an entire life out of controlling the frame. Out of making sure people saw the version of me I intended them to see. I was faithful in the story I told. I was unfaithful everywhere else. What Chef Anthony has built here is a dinner party where the body is the confession and there is no closing argument. Mistress Lynne sits at the head of a table that costs every man at it something real, and the architecture of the meal is designed so that nothing you feel can be attributed to misunderstanding. You are seen. Completely. By everyone.

My fantasy, the one I have been turning over in my cage since I first read the menu, is this: I am one of the three holding the tray. My arms are steady because they have to be, and everything below my waist is not steady at all, and every single person at that table knows it. There is no story I can tell about why. There is no charm deployed. My face is visible, my body is visible, the evidence of what I want is visible, and the cage is there to make sure the wanting stays exactly as it is. A fact about me, not a conclusion I can talk my way out of. The man I was would have found a way to explain that. He was very good at explaining. He pre-paid his arrangement here before he could convince himself otherwise, and I will say plainly that the cage is lighter when I stop lying. That is the thing about Chef Anthony's menu that most people probably miss: one hundred eighty-four thousand dollars does not buy you dinner. It buys you the moment you can no longer pretend the dinner is not happening to you.