KFC Establishments

After 20 grueling minutes at the gym where I pay through the nose to be in a sweat-heavy room breathing in other people’s maddening effluvia as they grunt and heave weights about thinking they’ll wake up in the morning looking like Jean Claude Van Damme in Kickboxer, I found myself to be in a slight dire need of sustenance. Luckily for the company that owns the chain of gyms, there’s a KFC just over the road.

I push the disarmingly cheap door open and entered the fried chicken joint with a heart-pulsing slip and slide on the greasy floor before I found my footing and strode to the counter like a soldier on his march home. “One of those, my good man!” I exclaimed as I pointed mightily at the new digital poster for the KFC Original Recipe Stacker. A few minutes passed where I was forced to listen to the unruly shout and bellow at each other during, and never between, enormous mouthfuls of food until a dirty, red tray holding my meal was pushed at my torso.
I thanked the young man with a cool nod, made haste to one of the few tables that wasn’t buried under a pile of shit and then sat down. My hands clasped around the warm and thin cardboard box. I opened the lid akin to a buccaneer opening a chest that contains the one cursed item that can bring his family back from the dead; excitement, wonder, and an overtone of sorrow and worry flowed through me, oddly energizing my waning body.

My elevating soul crashed back into me with a darkening rattle as I was greeted by this tower of human-constructed shit. The posters and advertising led me to believe that I’d get a sandwich that could settle wars – a sandwich that could stop time, one that would dare to dream. But alas, the collapsing wasteland of abused ingredients that was wilting before me exuded its pitifulness and it was up to me to take the plunge into this unholy mess.

The bread that bookended the hell that lay between was like ancient parchment. Dusty fragments of crumbling bread washed away as my fingers lightly impressed the bun with each progressively reluctant bite, like escape pods fleeing a downed vessel. Eventually, the bread vanished within the increasingly violent air that surrounded me and the guts of the meal glared as if I had undressed it. The two tremendously sized chicken fillets that featured as standard on KFC’s brutal advertising for this bollocks were as over-inflated as Tesco’s expectations on their staff’s hygiene. The chicken that I faced looked as novelty basketballs would once crushed by the weight of the ocean. Pieces of stringed chicken flattened, breaded, and fried with the super-secret herbs and spices made only to mask the slow-burning flavours of morbid gloom as it bleeds into your system, from your tongue to your toes.

I sadly ate the whole thing as eating this was only slightly better than quietly drifting off to an eternal sleep as I would’ve done if I hadn’t had this lie of a sandwich along with the cardboard fries and watery Pepsi.

I gently pushed my rubbish into the overflowing bin, held on the the wall, and with my head low I slowly walked out. Days are shorter and the nights invite the bitter cold to rattle my bones – I have a feeling this ‘Stacker’ had something to do with it.