Job satisfaction.

An old man with his front teeth missing, and a large hexagonal hole in the middle of his tongue, stood in front of a black machine that reached to the very top of a small room. A panel half-covered the darkness of gears and belts inside, and a makeshift-looking lever extended from a thin gap - the end was roughly cut and it's sharp, jagged edge had not been filed down. A slide exited the machine from just beneath the lever, and sloped down and straight out until it disappeared through a hole in the ground.

Suddenly a red light flicked on, and the man rushed to the lever, straddling the slide, which was high enough on the machine side that it could just fit under his crotch while both feet were still flat against the ground. He pulled the lever, and there was a crunching sound, and after a second a white hexagon appeared at the top of the slide. The man looked at it as it slid between his legs, and turning around, it appeared from his buttocks and continued to slide all the way towards and through the dark hole. When he realised it, the red light had been extinguished.

Suddenly it relit, and the man quickly pulled the lever, this time catching the white pellet before it slid away. He looked at it and, raising it to his face, smelled it. It did not smell of anything, but the sweat of his palm seemed to cling to it. He dropped it back on the slide, and when he looked at his hand, his fingers were coated in white. Bringing the residue to his face, it smelled rich and sweet as if it were an expensive dessert delicacy, and he put it to his mouth. It was so sweet that his tongue tingled to almost the point of pain.

When the light flicked on again, he pulled the lever and caught the pellet. He put it in his mouth, and the sweetness was the same, but when he chewed it, it immediately soured and he crumpled his face in disgust. There was nowhere to dispose of it, so he swallowed the remaining masses, and as much foul-tasting saliva as he could.

He let the next few slide past, but the taste would not go away, so he put another one in his mouth, whole, and immediately felt relieved. After playing with it for awhile, he slid it into the hole of his tongue, at which instant his whole body tingled, almost like pain.

While he managed the lever, clumsy with the strength of his sensation, he noticed that the upper and lower exposed edges of the pellet had begun to dissolve, when his tongue slid against the roof of his mouth and he could feel the hollow. Soon it was no more than a ring bordering the hole which would not separate, no matter how much he sucked at it. He put another one in his mouth, and it slid straight into the ring of the previous one, in self-attraction.

After that, everything was a cinch. Red light ⇒ lever → no red light. Pellet → no pellet ⇒ pellet. He was all but catatonic outside of the mechanically required motion. In a coma-dream, the light proliferated into an explosion of red electrons detected around a positive charge. His hand and the lever separated off, becoming a brilliant white ball oscillating at the tip of a pivoting blue-grey bar. The pellet was a drop of the same light, which a scoop splashed over the point between his eyes, and the sparkling water spread over and encircled his face.

In a moment of spontaneous erection, he perceived a silent scream coming from behind the pivot of the bar. Bloody screaming mouths, mutilated tongues. And within the wound, a hideous, unspeakable filth...