Mister Flesh and the Vending Machine Prophecy

I self-published a book on a Tuesday.

Not a meaningful Tuesday. Not a landmark-in-my-journey, personal-growth, coffee-shop-realization Tuesday. Just a microwave dinner, laundry half done, forgot my password again Tuesday. The kind of day that evaporates before you even notice it happened.

My name’s Alex Dunning. I was bored and mildly caffeinated. In a fit of ego-flavored malaise, I dragged a document titled finaldraft_reallyfinal_trustme.docx out of my Downloads folder, uploaded it to Kindle Direct Publishing, and hit Publish with the kind of casual decisiveness one normally reserves for clicking "Remind me tomorrow" on a system update.

The book was called Mister Flesh and the Vending Machine Prophecy. The title made me laugh. The cover was made in MS Paint. The blurb read: A postmodern satirical surrealist urban fantasy about snack food, metaphysical dread, and suburban plumbing.

I listed the genre as “Fiction (General)” and the keywords as “quirky, fiction, unique, unknown, please no one read this.”

I priced it at $1.11 because it seemed funny.

I didn’t expect it to sell. That was the point.

I just wanted to say, at parties I didn’t attend, that I had published a book. Past tense. Clean. Finished. Another failed dream filed away like a dusty gym membership or a half-started gratitude journal.

I posted a single Instagram story. Four people viewed it. One was my aunt. Another was someone named “RIPBluetooth_69,” who I’m pretty sure was either a bot or a sentient pair of earbuds.

I went to bed proud in the way you feel after cleaning one spoon in the sink.

The next morning, I had 208 emails.

The subject lines varied:

What did you DO to me??

I’ve read your book twelve times. It’s different now.

My blender won’t shut up about Chapter 4.

The first email read:

I read your book and now every time I close my eyes, I hear someone whispering "sodium chloride." I checked my salt. It’s fine. Is this a marketing thing?

Another simply said:

My uncle is crying. I didn’t know he could cry.

The book had sold 47,000 copies.

I refreshed the dashboard three times. Then I cleared my cache. Still there. 47,000.

The reviews were weirder:

Changed my life. And my dog’s. He speaks now. Only in riddles.

Mister Flesh came to me in a dream and taught me how to fold fitted sheets.

Chapter 9 predicted the exact day I would lose my left sock. The prophecy was accurate. I am frightened and impressed.

I tried to delete the book.

Clicked the button. Page refreshed.

Still there.

Tried to unpublish.

Error message: "This file has already been widely distributed. Reversal impossible. Thank you for your contribution to The Draft."

What the hell was The Draft?

Reddit knew.

A subreddit called r/TheDraft had materialized overnight with thousands of members. People were decoding symbols from the margins. (I had no idea there were symbols in the margins.) One user claimed the book rearranged itself if read aloud in front of a mirror. Another said the Kindle version set off their car alarm.

One post was a photo of a snack-food shrine: vending machine snacks arranged in a spiral, captioned: "For Mister Flesh. May he grant us the Crunch."

I got a cease-and-desist from a company called SnackCore Holdings. They claimed the book revealed sensitive proprietary information about the "psychosomatic resonance of artificial flavorings."

Then a literary agent emailed:

Hi. I laughed, I wept, I chewed through my own scarf. Can we talk representation?

I was invited on a podcast called What Even Is Art? hosted by a man named Jetson Milk.

Jetson: "So tell us about the vending machine monologue in Chapter 3. Were you thinking Derrida or more like late-period Seuss?"

Me: "I was thinking about how I once got a Snickers stuck and punched the machine."

Jetson: "Genius. Brutalist nostalgia."

Me: "I didn’t mean for anyone to read it."

Jetson: "That’s the deepest intention of all."

Book clubs sprouted in office supply stores, roller rinks, abandoned malls. Someone tattooed a quote from Chapter 6 on their neck: "The trash can speaks when the silence is ready."

A band named The Crumpled Foil Packet released an album where every lyric was a phrase from the book read by an AI voice.

Someone made tea blends based on different passages.

BuzzFeed ran a feature: This Self-Published Nobody Accidentally Wrote the New Internet Bible.

Then came the cult.

They called themselves The Fleshlings.

They wore name tags: Snack Seer, Crumb Apostle, Beverage Oracle.

Their leader was a woman named Karen with a Q, who claimed the book opened her third eye and also fixed her dishwasher.

They held public readings in gas stations and parking garages. Their chant: "Read. Chew. Know."

I tried filing a cease-and-desist.

The lawyer joined the cult.

In desperation, I wrote a sequel.

It was called The Flesh Files: Reheated. Intentionally boring. No metaphors. No vending machines. Just characters discussing tax forms and humidity.

It sold even faster.

One review read: "The bleak honesty of a crushed soda can beneath a rotting sun. Devastating."

I screamed into a pillow until the pillow whispered: "Crunch eternally..."

I went into hiding.

Deleted social media. Rented a sublet under the name NotAlex Definitely. Took a job in retail.

Customers still recognized me.

Not my face. Just... me.

One kid handed me a comic where Mister Flesh ran for President.

Another said: "Chapter 11 got me through my divorce. And the DMV."

I faked an accent.

"No, I am not zis author. I am from Swedeland."

It didn’t work.

I tried the woods. Off-grid. Pure solitude.

Someone had spray-painted a tree: "Flesh is truth."

I camped one night.

In the morning, a ranger offered me a signed hardcover of my book. “Found it floating in the river,” he said. “Still dry.”

The final straw: I appeared in my own dream.

Not as myself, but as Mister Flesh.

I spoke in rhyme:

Oh Alex Dunning, poor young fool,

You opened up the sacred spool.

You thought you wrote just aimless text,

But now you see—reality's hexed.

I woke up to 5,000 new reviews.

One simply read: "Dream confirmed."

Now I live in a lighthouse.

Renovated. Remote. Foggy. Full of gulls.

My mailbox overflows with snacks, fan letters, and the occasional flip-flop.

I’ve stopped resisting.

I wrote a third book: Mister Flesh: The Farewell Buffet.

It’s actually good. Honest. Heartfelt.

It ends with a sincere goodbye.

The cult interpreted it as a beginning.

So I sit on the porch, sip lukewarm tea, and watch the horizon.

Because I know it’s only a matter of time before someone rows ashore in a kayak made of Doritos, whispering a quote I didn’t know I wrote:

"The world is a snack you can't finish."

And somewhere, deep in a server farm, the book uploads itself again.