Vapid Wasteland Hibachi & Grill

The launch was being held in the courtyard of a boutique hotel in West Hollywood that had once been Spanish Colonial and was now simply expensive. White stucco, black iron, orchids in low bowls like they had been placed there to witness something clinical. The air smelled faintly of citrus peel, candle wax, and warmed electronics from the neon signage by the bar. Everywhere she looked, there were women lit like alibis.

She had written most of the campaign copy in a Google doc on a Tuesday afternoon while eating almonds out of a mug and trying not to think too hard about the phrase visible refinement. Now the phrase was six feet high in serif lettering behind a ring light.
Aesthetic clarity.
Resurfacing with confidence.
Clinical radiance.

Hearing it spoken aloud all evening had given it the texture of a curse.

A client in cream silk touched her elbow and said, “You wrote the line about becoming easier to read in your own skin, right? It’s brilliant. So elegant. It doesn’t feel aggressive at all.”
“Thank you,” she said, because she was a professional.

What she meant was: I have apparently become very skilled at describing punishment in aspirational language.

Servers moved through the courtyard with champagne in chilled stemless glasses. The women from marketing looked newly lacquered. One of the clinic nurses was explaining collagen stimulation in the soft devotional tone people used for skincare and cult leaders.

A girl in a blazer dress no older than twenty-six smiled at her over the bar and said, “You should totally try the treatment, by the way. Not that you need it, obviously. You just have the bone structure for something really subtle.”
For one stupid second, her whole body leaned toward the sentence like a plant toward bad light.
Then came the recoil.
Bone structure for it.
As if she had been standing there all evening as an excellent candidate for correction.

She drifted toward the mirrored wall behind the liquor display and caught herself there by accident. Not ugly. Worse. Human. A little shiny at the forehead. Tired around the mouth.
Behind her reflection, the campaign video played silently on loop: cheekbones, droplets, jawlines, light.

California, she sometimes thought, remained committed to the idea that a woman could suffer herself into coherence.

Someone announced dessert. She set her untouched champagne on a tray, found her bag, and left before anyone could ask where she was going, too hungry and too humiliated to go home.

She drove east without deciding to, then south, then through a series of streets that seemed less connected than themed. Los Angeles County after midnight had the exhausted glow of a face still wearing its event makeup. Medispas shone behind dark glass like little private chapels for correction. Pilates studios sat lit and empty, their machines arranged in pale rows like instruments for a very elegant punishment. Pharmacies hummed beside liquor stores, beside dead yogurt shops, beside restaurants still serving women who ate with the careful hand movements of people handling evidence.

She kept not going home.

At red lights, the city leaned toward her in fragments. Billboards with smooth foreheads and poreless shoulders. A whitening ad full of teeth too bright to belong to memory. A bus-stop poster showing a woman laughing with one hand at her throat, as if joy had recently been cleared by a specialist. Neon crossed the windshield in medicinal pinks and jaundiced blues. The warm air through the cracked window smelled of fryer oil, jasmine hedge, hot plastic, and something electrically sweet, like a curling iron cooling on a bathroom counter.

The farther she drove, the less the businesses seemed arranged by commerce and the more they appeared to have been sorted by appetite. Laser clinics. Urgent care. Hookah lounge. Beauty supply. Fancy pet bakery. Tax prep. IV hydration. Cryotherapy in brushed gold letters. All of it bright, all of it half-empty, all of it promising improvement in one dialect or another.

By the time she saw the hibachi place she was deep in one of those strip-mall corridors where every storefront looked temporary and overlit, like a dream of retail having trouble staying human. The sign buzzed above the lot in red and white. The asphalt held a thin metallic shimmer under the lamps. Palm shadows dragged over the stucco like false lashes. It was open, bright, and ugly in a way that felt briefly relieving, as if whatever happened inside might at least be honest about the performance.

She parked because it was late, she was hungry, and she could not bear her apartment yet.

Inside, the restaurant looked exactly like itself and slightly like a set built from memory. Red vinyl booths. Lacquered wood. A fish tank in the entryway full of orange-and-white koi moving with an air of expensive resignation. The place smelled of burnt sugar, garlic butter, hot metal, singed citrus peel, and something faintly cosmetic beneath it all, like aerosol hairspray or the warmed plastic scent of an overused flat iron.

At the host stand, reservation slips were stacked in a clear acrylic holder like tarot cards for the recently disappointed.

The hostess looked up and smiled at her with the bright, paused beauty of an old headshot. Not young, not old, just professionally preserved. Her face had the strange smooth composure of someone lit from three directions at once.“Welcome,” she said. “We have your table prepared.”
Not a table.
Your table.

The woman almost corrected her, then didn’t. It was late. She was hungry enough to be suggestible. Nobody asked why she was alone. That should have felt like mercy. Instead it gave the room the texture of prior knowledge.

She was led past the empty booths to one of the communal grills in the center, a polished black square set into the table like an altar with good ventilation. Around it sat the kind of people California kept producing in limited seasonal runs. A man with very white teeth and the faintly overexposed face of a former child actor. A blonde woman in activewear expensive enough to be ideological, stirring vodka into a mug of hot water with the solemnity of medicine. A man in bone-colored sneakers already telling no one in particular that he was “in transition.” Two immaculate women with blown-out hair and identical jewelry sat shoulder to shoulder in the brittle silence of people who had once chosen each other on purpose.

The hostess set her at the remaining place as neatly as if she were returning a missing piece to a game. Around the grill, sweating water glasses bloomed into identical rings. Chopsticks lay beside the plates in paper sleeves, wrapped like sterile instruments awaiting some festive procedure. From the fish tank near the door came the soft blurting rise of bubbles, reminiscent to the sound of someone trying not to cry in another room.

No one really looked at her. Or they all did in the flat, category-level way strangers in Los Angeles often managed, reading one another by type before bothering with personhood. She was not a woman at dinner so much as another stalled genre. The lone diner. The late-thirties copywriter. The woman in black who had come from somewhere more expensive and left early.

She had just decided that the grill looked less like a place to cook food than a stage for controlled combustion when the chef appeared at the end of the table with perfect timing, smiling with the game-show charisma of a man who might also know how to close a casket.

He introduced himself in a voice so polished it seemed pre-approved, then began the routine with the buoyant professionalism of a man entrusted with both entertainment and disposal. His knife flips were too clean. Not merely skilled. Edited. The blades seemed to complete motions before her eyes had time to register them. His little jokes landed with the hollow lift of lines tested in focus groups and rolled out nationally.

“Everybody hungry tonight?”

A few people smiled on cue. The former child actor nodded like someone remembering where the audience was supposed to be. The blonde with the vodka in hot water cupped her mug with both hands and watched the grill as if it had promised to solve something. The man in expensive sneakers laughed a fraction too early. The two immaculate women reset their faces into public compatibility.

Then the chef built the onion volcano.
He stacked the rings slowly, almost reverently, each pale circle lowered onto the next with the care of someone constructing a small ceremonial organ.
Oil hissed.
The lighter clicked.
A quick blue flare climbed the tower and everyone leaned in, obedient as plants toward bad light.
That was the humiliating thing about spectacle.
No matter how old the trick, no matter how tacky the room, people still wanted to believe fire might reveal something flattering.

At first it behaved. Small flame. Cheerful heat. The sort of tableside ritual meant to wring delight from children and ironic adults alike.

Then the onion rings darkened too fast.
Not burned.
Blackened and wet.
Oil blistered at their seams.
They looked lacquered, almost cosmetic, as if each layer had been shellacked for display after some private little catastrophe.
They did not collapse.
They opened.

Slowly and obscenely, the rings parted in slick black folds. Not flowers. Not exactly mouths either. More like something from the body had been coached into centerpiece behavior. Burned sea creatures. Lacquered wounds. Black tulips grown from an injury. Each petal curled outward to reveal a tiny glowing scene inside, lit from within as if by trapped emergency lighting.

In one, freeway lights pulsed red and white in endless braided lanes.
In another, a casting-call room held a row of women with clipboards in their laps and the same upright, borrowed hope.
Another contained a sober-living bunk under fluorescent light, blanket folded sharp as punishment.
A desert motel shimmered in the next, one dead palm bent over an empty pool.
Then a Pilates studio in merciless morning brightness, reformers aligned like elegant devices for correction.
Then an eviction notice taped crooked to a freshly painted white door.
Then a palm tree on fire against a pink sky, burning with theatrical patience.

The volcano gave a small wet cough.

Something pink hit the grill and skittered in a line of butter.
An acrylic nail, with a pale crescent of real cuticle still clinging beneath it.
Another cough sent a soft metal earring back bouncing twice near the soy sauce dishes.
Then a warped motel key card, black stripe blistered.
Then a single false eyelash stuck to a blackened crumb.
Then a little bent birthday candle, pink wax softened and glossy as cartilage.
Then, with a horrible pearl-bright neatness, a single baby molar with one thin root attached.

Nobody screamed. No one even gasped correctly. The table had gone still in the anxious, overmannered way people did when they feared being the only one to treat something as an emergency.

The chef did not look surprised.

The smoke should have risen. Instead it hung low over the grill, thick and dark and satin-slow, then folded downward as if inhaled by something beneath the metal. From there it moved sideways across the table in deliberate ribbons, brushing mouths, lashes, wrists, collarbones, entering personal space with the intimacy of a product sample.
It smelled different at each seat.
The former child actor seemed to catch hairspray and hot circuitry.
The blonde shut her eyes at something cleansing and expensive and wrong.
One of the immaculate women went pale.

When it reached her, it smelled like every humiliating Californian delusion she had ever dressed up as intention: dry shampoo, hot blow-dryer air, apartment-pool chlorine, self-tanner, lip gloss wax, hotel conditioner, old roses going warm at the stem.

The chef tapped the grill twice with one spatula. The sound rang out thin and metallic, less signal than summons.
“Tonight,” he said, smiling with gamed ease, “we honor transformation.”

From somewhere deeper in the restaurant, the birthday drums began.

They were too loud for the room and too cheerful by half, that same frantic little rhythm meant to force celebration into being whether or not anyone had earned it. The fish tank light brightened. No cake appeared. No candles. No mortified child in a paper crown. The drums simply kept going, bright and compulsory as applause in a studio audience.

Around the table, everyone held their expressions a fraction too carefully. The man in sneakers glanced around as if waiting for someone else to claim the ritual. The blonde tightened both hands around her mug. One of the immaculate women pressed her lips together so hard they vanished.

And then, because California had always been a place where people volunteered for the wrong things in the right tone, someone at the table said, “Woo.”

The drums kept going.
That was the first true obscenity.
Not the onion petals or the molar or the smoke moving like something with legal access to them, but the sheer stamina of the birthday rhythm, as if joy could be imposed by percussion and customer-service policy.
The chef smiled around the table, one hand raised in a small encouraging circle, conducting a compliance exercise.
“Come on,” he said lightly. “Let’s hear it.”

The man in expensive sneakers obliged first, eager in the brittle way of people who still believed participation might save them.
“Woo.”
Something in his face emptied.

Not pain. Not fear. Just a clean deletion, as neat as a record stripped from a file. He blinked, sat up, opened his mouth to continue whatever he had previously been saying about a launch, a platform, some app for creative logistics or emotional optimization or whatever men like him were always halfway through building. Nothing came. He looked down at his own hands with the mild betrayal of someone discovering he had misplaced a religion.

“I was doing something,” he said. “I had…”
The sentence died small and expensive in his throat.

The chef nodded as if a preference had been confirmed.
He turned back to the grill.
Shrimp flew from the edge of his spatula in clean pink arcs, glossy as boiled fingernails.
One landed belly-up and split slightly at the seam.
Steam rose in thick white sheets and for a second gathered into words over the black metal, though none of them held still long enough to be kind.
IMPROVE.
REFINE.
REDUCE.
Their edges softened and ran together, dissolving before the eye could accuse them of meaning too much.

The former child actor laughed too loudly, trying to repair the room with volume.
“Woo.”

His face changed almost at once.
“What was it called?” he asked, still smiling because the muscles hadn’t gotten the update yet.
“Jesus. What was the name?”
He looked from one stranger to another, frantic now.
“There was a diner set. I had a catchphrase. Thursdays at eight. What was the show called?”
His expression collapsed inward. Not grief, exactly. More humiliating than grief. A cavity where myth had been stored.

The blonde with the hot water and vodka closed her eyes, drew a breath that shook once on the way in, and offered her own “woo” like a person using a coping skill she no longer trusted.

Then she stared down into her mug, genuinely stricken.
“I can’t remember,” she said.
Mascara had begun to fray at the outer corners, enough to make her seem abruptly younger and less expensive.
“Was I supposed to get better here?”
Her fingers tightened around the cup.
“Or thinner. Or quieter. Was it healing? Was that what I called it?”

The two immaculate women held out longer, perhaps because mutual resentment had given them stronger structural integrity. But when one of them finally let out a thin managerial “woo,” the other turned toward her with naked bewilderment and said, “Wait. Which one of us wanted this?”

Neither answered.

The chef cracked an egg one-handed against the grill and opened it with a neat bright flick. Instead of yolk, a wet clot of milk-white baby teeth slid out in clear albumen, with one small pink tongue-shaped shred caught among them. They clicked softly against the steel. There was something so infantile and dental and culinary about it that her stomach lurched. The chef chopped through them with brisk, professional rhythm, folding them into the rice as if this were a matter of texture alone.

Around the black lacquered edge of the grill, the reflections of the diners’ faces shifted by fractions. Younger. Thinner. Smoother. Less inhabited. More expensive around the eyes. Better lit. Less alive.
She caught her own reflection there and hated the quick, traitorous part of herself that still knew exactly which version of her had once received the most social reward.

The chef looked up and smiled at her.
“Your turn.”

She did not want to give him anything. The drums carried on with insane buoyancy. Somewhere behind them, a server laughed in the wrong place. The fish tank bubbles rose like muffled panic.
“Woo,” she said.

The word left her mouth and took something with it.

For one cold, impossible second she could not remember whether she had come to California to be seen or to disappear. The two motives, which had once held up the whole architecture of her life, vanished together like files dragged off a desktop. She sat in the bright oiled heat with her hands folded near her plate and felt a clean internal blankness, a missing stair where a decade should have been.

Then it rushed back, hard enough to make her mouth flood with sourness.
Not memory exactly.
Recognition.
The restaurant was not punishing them.
It was processing them.

Across from her, the man in sneakers was still staring at his own hands. The blonde had begun to cry without sound. The former child actor mouthed possible titles to himself, each one wrong. The two women looked at each other with the chilled horror of people who had just discovered they might have built a life on borrowed instructions.

The chef kept cooking, calm and bright.
That was when she understood this wasn’t random.
The restaurant was sorting them.

Once she understood the restaurant was sorting them, the room stopped pretending to be singular.

It began in the edges. The painted mural beside the bar, all bamboo and koi and tasteful shorthand, flickered when she looked at it too fast and became for one blink a Rainforest Café thunderstorm: fake wet stone, violet lightning, mechanical leaves trembling with corporate menace.
The next blink restored the koi. A child’s souvenir sword appeared in the soy sauce caddy, its little plastic hilt stamped with a lion crest. Then it was gone.
A server passed with a sizzling steak platter that should have smelled of butter and pepper and instead gave off the sweet bruised reek of funeral flowers and hot blood diluted in dishwater.

The fish tank brightened. The koi drifted out of formation, and for one crawling second the glass held not fish but a row of wax-smooth human faces suspended in blue light, overfinished and tranquil, as if death had arrived only after contouring. Then the filter burped, the bubbles resumed their soft panicked climb, and the koi were back, expensive and resigned.

The drink menu beside her plate had changed too.
The heading now read
AFTERCARE.

Underneath it:
THE MAINTENANCE PLAN
vodka, saline, cucumber distillate, white pepper
best begun before visible decline

DEFERRED HUNGER
mezcal, tonic, mineral salt, grapefruit peel
not a meal replacement, though many attempt one

COMPLIANCE GIMLET
gin, green chartreuse, sweet acid
recommended for returning guests

THE IMPROVED WOMAN
vodka, pear, edible mica, cold foam
photographs beautifully

The fonts remained cheerful. The descriptions were almost tender. The whole thing had the bluntness of paperwork disguised as hospitality.

The chef saw where she was looking and smiled, not unkindly.
“Different branches specialize,” he said, turning the shrimp with a wet scrape that sounded briefly like skin against tile. “Depends what the customer came west to lose.”

The former child actor stared at him. “What?”

“Some locations handle nostalgia. Some vanity. The castle handles blood sport. Rainforest does collapse disguised as adventure.” One spatula gestured lightly toward the fish tank. He slid a dish of mustard toward no one. “This branch handles regret.”
The birthday drums had stopped, but their rhythm seemed to linger in the walls like a cheap second pulse. Around the table, the diners held themselves with the dazed stillness of people waiting to see what category had consumed them.

The chef went on in the same pleasant, overtrained tone she heard all day from practitioners selling acid peels and injectables as care.
“Reinvention. Aesthetic correction. Aspirational drift. People who came west to become someone else and stalled in the edit.”
He looked briefly at the two immaculate women. “Relational misinvestment.”
At the blonde with the mug: “Punishment sold as healing.”
At the former child actor: “Premature mythologizing.”
At the man in sneakers: “Entrepreneurial delusion.”
Then, smiling directly at her, “Brand-adjacent self-erasure.”

Something in her chest gave a tiny ugly laugh.

The soy sauce caddy beside her plate now held more than condiments. The little lion-hilted sword had returned. Beside it sat a single false eyelash glued to a blackened crumb, a waxy pink candle bent sideways like softened cartilage, a warped motel key sleeve, a laminated VIP wristband, one tiny pearl stud with no mate, and what looked disturbingly like a cooked contact lens, puckered white and almost translucent.

California, she realized, had not simply failed her. That would have required distance. She had collaborated. She had learned the language, written the copy, softened violence into promises of glow, then stood in front of the machine asking to be chosen by nicer lighting.

The smoke from the onion volcano, which had been moving in low patient ribbons around the table, reached her again.
This time it narrowed.
What came off it was so specific it made her go still: dry shampoo, apartment-pool chlorine, lip gloss wax, hot blow-dryer air, and the cold metallic smell of a Pilates studio at dawn before anyone had begun becoming better.

Underneath all of it was the original delusion.
Not fame.
Not beauty, exactly.
What the state had offered, in a thousand fonts and polished mirrors, was refinement.
Editability.
The chance to become narrower, smoother, easier to keep.

The chef’s attention settled on her with the unnerving concentration of a practitioner reviewing scans. Not predatory. Worse. Procedural. He looked at her the way clinic staff sometimes looked at women in profile, deciding where the original architecture had begun to offend the market.

He plated with care.

The shrimp came down first in a neat curved line, vertebral and glossy, a little pink spine laid along one side of the dish. Beside it he pressed the fried rice flat with the back of the spatula until it formed a clean-edged rectangle the exact dimensions of a headshot. Over that he drizzled a pale ribbon of sauce so thin and deliberate it looked less like garnish than pre-operative marking. Then he placed three blackened onion petals across the top, arranged not as food but as if they had once belonged to something holy and had been cauterized off in sections. The plate looked less assembled than rendered. Every component had been pressed, aligned, lacquered, and made to hold still. Even the butter at the edge seemed intentional, collecting in gold beads like filler settling under skin.

“You came for refinement,” he said.
The sentence landed with the terrible soft authority of something she had once told herself in good lighting.

She looked down at the grill to avoid his face and saw her reflection in the black steel, wavering under the heat. In that light she resembled a before image somebody had forgotten to fix. Around her mouth, a tiredness the skincare line would have called texture. Around the eyes, the faint strain of someone who had spent years participating in her own reduction with the hope that it might eventually read as grace.

The chef went on, still pleasant.
“You got stranded between edits.”

The man in sneakers made a small involuntary sound, as if in sympathy or recognition. One of the immaculate women stared at her plate with the fixed concentration of a witness trying not to become part of the record.

“A lot of women do,” the chef added. “You were almost a loyalty member.”

On her plate, one of the black onion petals twitched and opened a little wider.
Inside, glowing low and infernal, she saw not a memory exactly but a processed version of one. Herself years earlier outside a West Hollywood Pilates studio at dawn, shoulders back, stomach held hard, expensive leggings she could not afford, a green drink in hand. But the image had been improved. The jaw smoothed. The eyes brighter. The waist reduced by some modest, marketable cruelty. Behind her, other women exited the studio with her face. The glass door reflected not the parking lot but the hibachi grill, bright and black and waiting.
The tiny woman in the petal lifted the drink to her mouth. Inside it, something pale knocked once against the plastic lid. Teeth, maybe. Ice. She couldn’t tell.
The petal closed again.

The grill hissed beneath the plate, an administrative flame.
The shrimp spine gleamed.
The headshot-rice held its shape.

And there it was, finally, not as metaphor but category.
She understood what kind of customer she was.

She stood so abruptly the chair legs bit the floor. Nobody stopped her. That was the worst part. No alarms. No command barked across the room. No hand on her wrist. The chef merely inclined his head as if she had asked for the check.

The hallway to the entrance seemed longer than before, stretched by some petty architectural malice.
She passed the hostess stand and saw the reservation slips fanned in their acrylic holder, each one labeled in tidy block letters: SECOND ACT. PENANCE. RECOVERY. CORRECTION.
One near the back simply read RETURNING GUEST.

In the fish tank, the koi were gone. In their place, for one impossible second, tiny birthday candles burned underwater in a wavering row, pale flames holding steady as if oxygen had become a customer-service issue someone else had solved.

“Drive carefully,” the hostess called after her in the same bright, wrong tone she had used to welcome her.
“The process can feel disorienting at first.”

Outside, the warm air hit her with the stale softness of a blow-dryer left running in an empty room. The lot looked flatter now, less like pavement than a dark tray waiting to receive spills. Light trembled in thin petroleum colors across the asphalt. The palms along the curb seemed too still, like decorative plants in a lobby after everyone had gone home.

She got to her car shaking harder than she wanted to admit and found a branded takeout box in her hands, white cardboard warming her palms. She did not remember anyone giving it to her.

In the car, the takeout box sat in her lap radiating a gentle impossible warmth, as if whatever had been packed inside had been kept under a heat lamp designed for confessions. The parking-lot lights flattened everything into bad theater. The hibachi sign buzzed over the windshield in red and white, then steadied.

She lifted the lid.

Inside, centered in the white cardboard like a sample sent home after consultation, lay a single blackened onion petal opened into the shape of a flower.
Glossy.
Delicate.
Ruinous.
Its edges were lacquered as if painted there by heat.
In its cupped center, glowing softly, was a tiny moving scene.

At first it was the Pilates studio memory. Dawn light. Green drink. Borrowed confidence. The old belief that California might still sand her into someone easier to keep.

Then it changed.

The tiny version of her lifted the drink and tipped it back. Instead of liquid, something pearly knocked against the plastic lid and slid forward all at once, a soft little spill of teeth and smoke. She kept swallowing anyway. The women exiting the studio all turned at once, and each of them had the hostess’s old-headshot smile. Behind them, the glass door no longer opened into the studio at all but into the hibachi restaurant, red booths and black grill waiting in miniature.

Above the door hung a little sign in cheerful serif type:
WELCOME BACK

The tiny woman looked up. For one terrible second, she looked directly out of the petal.

Then the whole image flattened, went glossy, and became something like a promotional card: her face subtly improved, jaw tightened, eyes brightened, every human irregularity professionally reduced. But the smile was wrong. Too many teeth. Too uniform. Less grown than installed. On the back, visible just before it curled inward again, was a loyalty stamp nearly filled.

She snapped the box shut hard enough to hurt her fingers.

When she looked up, the strip mall no longer held still.
The medispa across the lot flickered behind its dark windows, and for an instant the sign above it no longer read LUMEN AESTHETICS but something older and more procedural, all the vowels burned out.
Farther down the road, another storefront stirred to life.
Then another.
A waxing studio.
A juice bar.
A place selling cryotherapy in brushed gold letters.
Each one lit from within with the same patient internal glow, as if a system had recognized her and was waking up in sequence.

Across the lot, another business began to glow from within.

California, she thought, had always known how to scale a hunger.

author’s note

As I’ve mentioned in previous author’s notes, my inspirations are often drawn from real life.
Yes, I really did go to hibachi tonight.
No, I did not go alone.
I went with twelve other people, and I appreciate them very much for including me, especially since it allowed me to come home and immediately transmute the experience into grotesque fiction, because writing horror is, quite simply, my love language.

And as always, thank you to the vapid wasteland blonde. Your regional slander has finally been honored in title form.