The Fnord You Are Chewing

She is standing at the roller grill in a gas station off the interstate, and it is a Friday, and she does not know either of these things.

This is not her fault. The Curse of Greyface — pressed into the species since 1166 BC, the year a serious man taught that disorder is sin and life is a ledger — does not announce itself. It works by editing. It removes the holy from the visible spectrum, the way the fnord is removed: the word the schooled eye slides off, present on every page, read by no one. She has been schooled. She slides off her own Friday.

She takes a hot dog. No bun — they are out of buns, which is to say the universe has stocked the shelf correctly. She eats it standing up, over a paper boat, under a sign advertising lottery tickets, and she feels nothing, because feeling something would require seeing what she holds.

What she holds is a sacrament.

What Eris said, who was leaning on the chip rack

"Look at her," said the goddess, who was uninvited to this gas station as She is uninvited to everything — that is Her nature, the Original Snub, the one who rolled the golden apple marked KALLISTI under the door and let the mortals fight over who it praised. "She is receiving Me and calling it a snack. This is My favorite kind of worship. It does not know it is worship. It cannot be corrupted into a religion, because no one would join a church whose Eucharist costs a dollar fifty and comes off a heated cylinder."

The Fourth of the Pentabarf forbids the Discordian to eat a hot dog bun on a Friday. Read it again — slowly, the way you cannot read a fnord. The bun is the prohibition. The bun is the order, the casing, the grim packaging the Curse wraps around every wild thing so it can be carried without staining your hands. Strip the bun and what remains is just the meat of the matter, naked on a Friday. Is it holy? Sri Syadasti — patron of the qualified maybe, whose seven-fold predication answers every question seven ways at once — would only say: in some sense. He would say it of the meat, and of the missing bread, and of you for asking. He would keep saying it until you stopped needing a straight answer, which is the answer.

"I did not hide My sacrament in a temple," Eris said. "Temples can be found. I hid it where you would never look — in the most ordinary food in the most ordinary country, eaten by people too busy to be reverent. That is a better hiding place than any vault. The greatest fnord is not a word hidden in a sentence. It is a sacrament hidden in a snack."

The woman finished. She crumpled the paper boat. For one half-second — Setting Orange, the fifth day, the color of the grill light — she almost saw it. A flicker. The whole cosmos balanced on a tube of mystery meat and the deliberate absence of bread.

Then the Curse closed over the gap like water, and she thought: I should eat better.

She walked out into the parking lot, fed and fnorded, a genuine Pope who would deny it under oath, carrying a communion she would never remember taking — which is, the goddess noted with enormous tenderness, the only kind that ever takes.

"Hail Me," said Eris to no one, picking an apple off the chip rack. "And while you're at it — and you never are — hail thyself."

Hail Eris. Read suspiciously. Next Friday, see what you're eating.