The Vending Machine at the End of the World

The lights went out when a kid with a scarf over his mouth whacked its face with a metal bat, and then it started singing. Before that, it had been quiet. It had been quiet for months. Before that, it had been chaos. The janitor still came every day, swept the floors in search of some normalcy.

Now the machine sang like a banshee through its new shattered mouth, a banshee of alarms that startled the hungry boy into running, his fear overshadowing his empty stomach. He skidded down empty hallways until he couldn’t hear the scream anymore, and when he was gone, the machine sang some more. The janitor came and taped an ‘out of order’ sign over it, but didn’t return the next day to fix it. Or the day after.

Why had it been this piece of glass to shatter? The coils that withheld treasure worth more than gold now sprung out of rhythm and dropped their goods into the machine’s apron. The machine smacked its metal lips, hungry for coins that held no worth anymore, and bellowed.

Its bellow turned to a wail, and it wailed until it was hoarse, which took at least a year or so, until its battery began to fail. A year into its miserable solo, another hungry soul followed the final notes like a siren song. He found his salvation in a couple dozen stale cereal bars, and left the machine to die alone. But before he left, he fished in his pockets for a relic, and put a dime in the slot, the machine’s final meal.