I’d been noticing more demons hanging out in the prison’s kitchen than usual. My co-workers in the kitchen, who I had amiable relationships with before, began to be influenced by the demons. I saw the Fallen whispering into the ears of my culinary-incarcerated brethren, and I witnessed my co-workers begin to turn against me.
For this reason, I rightfully became afraid of eating in the cafeteria. I gathered from the smirks of the serving staff that there was likely something special in my food every night. The taste was off on many of those nights, and five times I got food poisoning so bad I had to be put on fluids in the infirmary.
Then, a couple of days ago, I was making pizza dough in the 140 quart Hobart commercial mixer. That night was pizza night, and the inmates actually like my homemade dough recipe. It’s one of the few things handed down to me by my Italian grandmother, and the prison approved my ingredient alteration. So I became popular — well, for a very short while, at least.
The mixer I was using stands as tall as I am, with a thirty-five gallon bowl below it. A single corkscrew beater rotated to turn the ingredients I’d lovingly (though admittedly half-assedly) put together to create the dough. I was leaning against the mixer, looking into the bowl to check the progress of the dough. I started daydreaming. At the moment, I can’t remember exactly what I was daydreamin. However, in the middle of a particularly delightful image, I saw the bottom of my apron fling itself into the mixing bowl. I knew I had tied the strings in the back, so there is no way the apron could have fallen in on its own.
I remember that I heard movement behind me, and I almost turned around to see who had played this hijinx. However, I didn’t get a chance to turn because I quickly understood that I had bigger problems in front of me.
I instinctively tried to pull back, but the bottom of the apron had already become snagged on the pointed end of the beater. To my horror, I realized I was being pulled into the mixer by the rotation of the beater, which was rapidly wrapping my apron around it. I tried to turn the behemoth off, but the kill switch is on the other side of the blender head where I couldn’t reach it. I was being dragged into the bowl by the strap around my neck toward an unforgiving and relentless stainless steel beater.
In a panic, I shot a look sideways and screamed for help – only to see two of my fellow kitchen workers just standing there, snickering.
I shrieked as my head was pulled into the stainless-steel bowl toward the rotating beater. In desperation, my blood-curdling scream of “HELP ME!!!!” echoed against the side of the bowl. I could not release a second scream because the apron had become twisted and was choking the life out of me as well.
I felt sure that the command of “MOVE!” and footsteps running toward me would be the last sounds I would ever hear. I clenched my eyes shut and braced myself for a certain end and the beater scrambled my skull into the batter.
Suddenly, the kitchen fell silent as the sound of the mixer’s motor came to an unexpected halt. I didn’t have to open my eyes to understand that my cheek was mashed against the side of the dough-covered beater. The feeling of pizza dough pressing against my cheek was real enough.
The CO took a minute, but was finally able to unlock a kitchen knife from the security cabinet and cut my apron string to free me. I wheeled around to see if I could get a glimpse of the clandestine two who attempted to make my head into butter, but the cowards had already made their exit.
Will this torment ever end?