The Betrothal: Arch-Burgers

A BETROTHAL excerpt on the types of fast-food joint you might find yourself in.

A lot of people falsely believe that every fast-food burger place is the same, but this is far from the truth. Like most things in the universe there are three distinct types of Arch-Burgers and its cousins. It’s a rule. 

The most common kind is the Zombie Arch-Burgers. You walk into these all the time and it’s the general view of what people think of when they think fast-food. Workers that are barely awake with grease stains on their clothes, stale fries, microwaved burgers, and five day old nuggets—or tenders or strips or whatever the corporation has trademarked—that taste like cardboard, that type of thing. The whole place has this feeling like it has lost its brains and is looking for another one, maybe yours. With secret sauce on top. Or maybe the secret sauce is made out of brains…oh my Earth Goddess, I cracked the code! I feel like Robert Langdon… 

The next rarest form is the Uber Arch-Burgers. Merely stepping inside will tell you if you are inside of an Uber Arch-Burgers. First, it will be clean. But, there will also be expensive decorations, usually something somber yet inspiring an artistic heady flair, like model ships or cast-iron animals. Somewhere in an Uber Arch-Burgers you will also find a television, and probably a brand new one, with the news turned on and a few yuppies drinking coffee around it while they use the Uber WiFi to update their social networking sites about the fact they are eating at an Arch-Burgers…because people really care. Optional is a section just for children, with a ball pit and jungle gym that you might even find at a Zombie Arch-Burgers, but also with added video game stands that usually ended up drawing Tad and I like a bee to honey and eventually getting us kicked out once enough parents complain about us hogging the toys. 

Rarest of all fast-food, is the Crazy Arch-Burgers. If you’ve been in one, you know what I’m talking about. The Crazy Arch-Burgers literally sits on top of some kind of mystical fairy magic field and draws every crazy person within five miles to it, and those that aren’t crazy are made crazy just by walking in the door. I once walked into a Crazy Arch-Burgers and in the course of one meal happened to have one guy sit across from me out of nowhere and act like I wasn’t even there, another lady walk in with her own homemade sammich and not order a single thing, another guy walk in and order breakfast at two in the afternoon before throwing a hissy fit on his way out about ‘You can’t even get burger in this place!’, and the finale before I ran outside screaming to try to warn people away was a kid cutting his arm on the ball slide, and blood fountaining out like he was in a Tarantino movie. Beware the Crazy Arch-Burgers, it will change you…and not for the better.

You can read more Arch-Burger adventures in THE BETROTHAL: OR HOW I SAVED ALAN EDWARDS FROM 40 YEARS OF HELL by Richard Raley, available at Amazon and Smashwords.