A WORK OF TREMENDOUS FICTION WORTH IS WEIGHT IN LEAD-BASED HOMINY
BY JOSH POOLE & TRAVIS WELLMAN
I don’t know how I ended up here, working as a pot washer in a brewery nestled among the vertebra of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the devil’s spine, the central nervous system of the southeastern United States. My hands have been reduced to vermillion starfish that crawl across the plates, devouring any remnants of food left by patrons before crawling up inside the conch of a stainless saucepan to eat away at the burnt queso inside. I move slow, harboring an intimacy with the cutlery that can only be derived at the intersection of mid-twenties burnout and ten bucks an hour. I can go hours without having a single thought, without muttering a word, without experiencing any facet of the evolved conscience.
The shift-lead here, a young man with a fraternity-snare to his voice and a college background, diagnosed my mindless state as “Dissociative fugue” or “sensory disinterest”. There was only two of us there that Saturday night, our numbers made scarce by the line cook finding himself lost in the euphoria of a new and passionate relationship that had him with a case of sexually-induced hemorrhoids that I can only assume resulted from a veritable pussy holocaust the evening before. The prep-cook, the only other soul trapped in the kitchen that day, had earlier held up a malformed strawberry, one depressed in the center, and remarked “look, it’s Slick’s asshole.”
It’s hard to come to terms with working in a place that also employs a man named Slick. Harder still to come to terms with knowing that in the kitchen-food chain, he’s the lion, the apex predator whose job I’m out to get, crouched in the bushes with a safari rifle, waiting only for my chance. He stood broad-side, displaying his two-lane road of a chest, presenting me with an easy target. I slide the shell into the chamber, waiting for the thunder of frozen wings going in the deep fryer to cock the noisy hammer. The scope to my eye, the reticle becomes the center, the focal point of all that exists. There is only the scope, only the shot, only the hunter. Breathe in, breathe slow, let it out, squeeze the trigger, don’t pull it, it’s all over now, let it be done.
My clean shot was blocked in an instant by the hideous rows and columns of a red flannel shirt.
“Heyifyougottaminutewouldyougogetthedishesoffthetables?” The words rolled out of his mouth like tickets from an arcade machine.
“Sorry, what was that, chef?” I peeled my eye away from the scope.
Goddamn, I thought, what in the name of God is my manager doing here. What is that thing hanging over his mask? Is it a nose? Or some terrible master controlling him.
“There’sabunchofdishesouttheremanwouldyougogetthemrealquick,” he replied, the creature tucked itself back inside the mask as if it knew I had seen it and would report my findings to the proper authorities.
Goddammit, I just finished washing the dishes, and already there’s more. It never ends, wave after wave of unclean ceramics throwing their bodies over the trenches.
“Whatwasthat?” He asked.
Shit, there I go, speaking my thoughts again. Am I doing it now?
“I’ll go get those dishes, chef.”
I walked through the narrow corridor that connected the kitchen with the dining room, emerging on the other side with a soaked groin from the sink sprayer and fog coating my glasses to the point where I had to use echolocation to find the large tub of dirty dishes.
“Get over here,” I heard a voice from behind the bar, “let me clean your glasses.”
I put the tub back down and moved towards the noise, feeling relief at the sensation of cold hands peeling the optics away from my ears. My vision was partially restored, enough to see that the entire dining area was filled to the brim with snarling meat-and-three types.
“How can you see with these things,” the bartendress shook her head while applying some sort of fragrant ointment to the lenses and scrubbing them with a small cloth before shoving the lenses back onto my nose.
“Thank you—” I began, but was cut short by the ghoul who’d just burst through the front doors behind me.
“Oh Christ not again,” the bartendress wailed with dread as the entire taproom turned to face the Strange.
It was no more than five and a half feet tall, with long, greasy hair that drooled from the back of its red hat. One eye was in its proper place, while the other was poised like a fungus far up the side of his head. Its nose hung down an inch too far with the wingspan of a B-17 while hanging loosely from its body were painter’s clothes with a splatter of red across the crotch and stomach. The bartendress steadied her hand over the tap, hovering just above the controls, ready to play the pilsner flute to the creature’s tune.
The patrons were as frightened of the thing as any of us, taking care to turn away or busy themselves with conversation. It had a strange, mangled sentience to the way it walked, a form of locomotion that I can only describe as picking up its leg and throwing it like a sack of potatoes several feet ahead before dragging the other one behind and then repeating this cycle over and over. As it neared the bar, the entire row of factory-assembled sorority blondes abandoned their stools, fleeing in terror as far as they could run.
“The usual,” it said, its feral cadence crisp and clear from a maskless face.
I knew that the bartendress had an entire repertoire of indiscretions that she was capable of deploying with Mozart-esque timing, but instead, she poured the pilsner. The glass was quickly filled with a liquid gold topped with a crème as thick as two fingers that drew closer to the rim en route to the man.
“Heywholethimbackinhere?” My manager appeared from the ether, his apron untied and swaying.
“You don’t get in between a buffalo and its watering hole,” the bartendress replied quietly. “Christgivehimwhathewantsandmaybehe’llleave.”
“That’s what I’m doing,” this time the bartendress’s eyes grew large, indicating that it was time for the manager to get back in the kitchen and stay the hell away from the bar.
“Alright,” my manager paused before moving his eyes towards me, letting me know that I was past-due to return to my sodden station.
I picked up the tub once again, pausing to look back at the Hieronymous Bosch creature sitting at the bar and shuffled back to the humidity and the heat. Once back at the sink, I set to work, maneuvering what remained of my hands through the dish-ware until everything had been sprayed off, soaped, sanitized and dried. At last, I was alone to survey my clean, immaculate surroundings,
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair…
“Hey I need this back ASAP,” the shift lead’s voice snapped me from my reverie as a mixing bowl the size of a tank turret came flying across the dish pit and came to a spinning, screeching halt in the sink in front of me.
“Yes sir,” I replied, only for a saucepan to crash on the stainless runway a moment later while the manager muttered “wegotsixteenmorereservationssogetready,” with a floating coward’s sympathy before dashing away to some other task.
I tried to resume my tasks, but the contorted face of the thing drinking pilsner after pilsner at the bar still haunted me. How could such a creature be kept alive? The thing drank like a frat house and talked like a bagpipe full of gears.
I rush through the mixing bowl, tossing it into the machine washer to focus on scrubbing a shift’s-worth of burnt shit off the saucepan before rushing out into the taproom to seize the once-again full tub of dirty dishes collected by front of house. On the way back into the dish room I stumbled into my manager, who was rushing from the dish pit onto the line with the freshly cleaned saucepan. The impact of our collision emancipated the saucepan from his grip, and the tub of dishes from mine.
The tub crashed down to the floor in a ceramic rain, a quick sequence of crashes that struck the ears over what felt like several seconds of delayed gravitational surrender. The pan impacted a moment later, striking the filthy tile floor with the noise of a hell rendered hollow, bouncing around with impossible kinetic energy before coming to a rolling stop next to my feet.
“Youneedtosaysomethingwhenyoucomearoundacorner. Thenstufflikethiswon’thappenokay? Don’tletthishappenagainbuddy.”
I heard nothing but his last word, “buddy”.
Buddy. I thought to myself.
Buddy.
“I have to take a piss,” I informed him before disappearing into the crowded taproom, adjusting my mask in the hopes that I could create a more proper seal.
In the taproom, I was careful not to gaze at the creature, but the ratatatata of a nervous mechanical pen clicking drew my eyes in that direction.
“Hey, you,” the creature slurred while chunks of meat fell out of its mouth. One of its arms lay tucked inside a pants pocket while the other reached out towards something incorporeal in the air with skeletal fingers attached to a potato-sack body.
“Yes, sir?” I tucked my arms behind my back and morphed into a waiter.
“You the dish man?”
“Yes.”
“My plate’s got a stain on it, see?” It thrusted the dish towards me, showing me that there was, in fact, a miniscule speck of black on the dish located too far from the loaded fries to imply causation.
“I’m sorry, I wash a few hundred dishes an hour and—”
“You stupid?” he asked, guzzling down another pilsner as if it were water before half regurgitating everything back up while continuing to try to speak in gargled squawks.
“I gotta piss, I’ll be right back,” I muttered, peeling my apron off and tossing it down in the middle of the taproom floor.
I marched outside, bursting through the doors with the same vigor that the creature had when it had entered. The night air was crisp, cool, I felt like a glass of beer condensing around my edges. I thought about the apron left in the taproom, how it must look like I’d been vaporized or abducted and left only a single article of clothing as a testament to my existence. I breathed in and out, wondering if I should bother clocking out to salvage a day’s pay.
Everywhere I looked I saw his face, the uneven eyes and pictured the viral load being shot out of his mouth like an Ottoman bombard every time he spoke. I thought of the hundreds of souls that came in and out each and every day. I thought of how my paychecks couldn’t cover my rent, about how it felt to go home soaking wet and covered in half-eaten food. Of jumping in the shower to try and shed any evidence of the day but finding the stench of burnt queso in my fingertips when I curled up to sleep.
I’d worked four jobs since the outbreak last March, and I’d been fired from all four. I knew I couldn’t make my rent, I knew I couldn’t keep it up, but I did it anyway, I’d gone feral once again. I walked to my car, oblivious to the light rain that had began to seep through my shirt and into my skin. I pictured the creature’s contorted face, the mortal storm of working in a bar and hoping I wouldn’t get sick and puke up my humanity. I thought about how I’d take the long way home as I whipped the car out onto the road. Lastly, I thought about everyone working from home and in their cubicles, about how through this entire affair there had been mercy afforded, but none, no mercy for the strays.
