Tickets

By: Emily Fiedler

After slipping behind the bar to clock-in, Liza is accosted by her overly-enthusiastic coworkers. Some are already balling up their aprons. Of course, they’re so peppy! They’re about to go home!

Brian smiles as she waltzes in. He’s head of the morning cooks. Easily frazzled but masks it with his incessant chattiness. “Good morning, Liza!”

“Hey, Brian. How’s your day been?” It’s three o’clock in the afternoon. He thinks he’s hilarious.

“Just fantastic!” He skips around the corner with a 22-quart container of chipotle ranch, large enough to fit a seven-year-old child inside.

Shift change is always hectic. The kitchen can barely fit the five cooks that are in there most of the time. Make it ten, and it feels like a sack of hot, sweaty---

“Red onions,” is smeared across the white board. Better get on that before she gets yelled at for not doing anything. Liza wrestles the large sack of them out the crowded walk-in and lays out a cutting board to start dutifully preparing them for tomorrow.

“SCREE---EEE---EEE---EEEECH!” The ticket machine shrieks as it prints, not unlike the customers responsible for the order outside. Metal spatulas clang against the grill in reply, splitting and splicing meat. Silverware clatters into stainless steel sinks, the sound ringing throughout the kitchen then drowning in the ocean of noise.

“Liza, get on steam table! Martin, I need four salsa apps! Jenna, three quesos!” Amara, captain of the night crew, announces from the expo window.

“Heard.”

Huh, the morning shift is already gone. She rushes over to her station and studies the tickets, “I need chicken down. Fish. Three steak. And an egg!”

“Heard. Chicken. Fish. Steak. Egg.”

Gotta cook some tortillas. Stove feels hot. Sweat beads down the back of her neck. Her shoulder blades. The inside of her calves. She could just throw down the whole bag of them onto the flame. The plastic would bubble and melt. The dough inside would probably catch fire. Not for long, though. It’s caked with dirt, but there’s a fire extinguisher in the back-right corner. Next to the window.

“Liza, your flour tortillas are burning.” Amara points.

She flips them over onto their raw side. “Oh! Thanks!” Tortillas. Tortillas. Tortillas. Tickets have 12, 18, 38 tacos on them. 38 tortillas. Keep putting more down in between so they don’t run out.

“SCREE---EEE---EEE---EEEECH!”

She could just quit right now. Her $473.82 electric bill came in yesterday. She definitely can’t quit. Her jobless roommates already transferred their shares from their parents. What she would give for easy money like that. Money that doesn’t require working full-time, while being a student full-time, in a kitchen where the air conditioner doesn’t work.

Liza’s complained to her coworkers about her privileged friends dozens of times. They claim that regardless of parents’ income, it's better to work for your education. Makes you appreciate it more. Or something. She still doesn’t buy it. The harder she works, the more strained she is for time and energy to do her school work. And then she just feels like she’s wasting her time in school because she can’t devote the necessary time and energy to it, so her work is shit. And she’s $40k in debt. And---

“SCREE---EEE---EEE---EEE---EEE---EEE---EEE---” It’s unending. Her rail is packed with finger-stained tickets and more stacked on the shelf beneath. Monstrous to-go orders leer at her with their 80 tacos on each of them.

What if she just screamed right now. Like horror movie, bloody murder. Would it be cathartic? Embarrassing. She’d probably be fired. Or strapped to an ambulance bound for a psychiatric hospital. Or both, even better.

Instead, she chugs tap water from the warm bottle resting underneath the table, attempting to replenish what’s seeping out of her skin. Feels better, actually. It’s amazing what dehydration does.

“Hey Liza! Switch with Jerome on dish so he can go on break.”

“Heard.” The dish pit is a welcome respite from the scalding heat and unrelenting pressure of the kitchen. She’ll take it gladly.

In the dish pit, she’s alone. She could just leave. Throw down her greasy apron, sprout wings, and fly away. Like a sticky, sweaty fairy. She could find a new magical world to live in and make her home. A world where all buildings are magically a breezy 70 degrees Fahrenheit at all times, even industrial kitchens. And no one is charged obscene electric bills for broken air conditioning units. And there’s a lot of sparkles. Liza just likes sparkles.

She is the furthest from sparkles right now. Servers dump dirty plates caked with food into the sink beside her. The other sinks are brown with dirty water, so she drains them, scrubs the sides and bottom, and refills them with clean, soapy water. Then, she sprays off each dish, scrubs it, rinses, and sanitizes it.

Spray. Scrub. Rinse. Sanitize. Load into washing machine. Pull down the crank. Lift the crank. Take out the dishes. Repeat.

Avocado and rice build up on the sides of the sink like layers of sediment. Rocks are so much wiser than humans. They are older than anything living and will still be around long after anything living dies. Just by existing. They don’t have to work for it, toiling day after day. They just let themselves be. And when nature transforms them, they continue just being. What Liza would give to be a rock. Just so she could rest a bit.

She closes her eyes for just a minute. For those sweet seconds, the wail of the ticket machine disperses. The shouts of her fellow cooks wane. The crashing of spatulas, plates, utensils drones out. She could almost just take a nap right here. Curl up on the cool, damp tiles. Sleeping is a lot like being a rock. Do rocks dream?

She opens her eyes.

“Liza! Liza! We need molcajete bowls!”

“Coming!” She blinks, grabs the stack of bowls to her right, and rushes into the kitchen.

“Hop on apps, please!” A garland of tickets still adorn the kitchen rails. She’s ready to go home, but the people still want food, so food they shall get. “Apps” or appetizers come in the form of salsa, guacamole or queso. The newborn form of the very bowls she’d been scrubbing earlier.

Liza arrives at the small cooler known as the app station. She immediately starts preparing the orders looming down at her from the garland. Salsa. Ladle into a bowl. Chips alongside it. Guacamole. Spoon into a bowl. Scoop of pico de gallo on top. Chips. Salsa again. Queso! Quesos come straight from the oven, hot and melted deliciously for each order. She takes the hot tray and adds chips. Salsa again. Again and again.

When it’s busy, sometimes time goes by so quickly that before anyone realizes it, the shift is over. Other times, time seems to stand still, and the orders keep coming, and it feels like drowning. Choking on the waves in liminal space. Torn between a desperation to stay afloat and a dejected acceptance of it all.

But as the night falls, the tide recedes, and they can all breathe once more.

“Time to break down.”

Liza takes a deep breath for the first time in hours. Then she packs the remaining food into new containers, labels them, and returns them to their homes.

Each and every surface. Every corner. The floors. The equipment. The shelves The tables. Hell, even the tables’ legs. All are scrubbed in bright sudsy soap with Brillo pads. Then they get rinsed. Everything is degreased until no sticky glean of oil remains throughout the kitchen. Finally, fluffy cloths wipe it all down in sanitizer.

Everything is moved aside for the floors. First, they sweep. Then they flood the place with bleach and degreaser and water. And then they scrub real good. And then they have to get all of it off the floors, so they mop it up. They set up the kitchen for the prep cooks coming in at the crack of dawn. And finally. Finally, they can clock out and go home.

Liza wipes the sweat off her brow and prepares her bag. She walks home in the dark. Despite her stubborn intentions, she did not quit today. She did not light tortillas ablaze or scream like her life depended on it. She did not take off to fairyland or metamorphosize into a rock. She worked her eight hours, and, come Friday, she would be paid. And so would her electric bill.

It is days like this that remind her what it means to be a cook. Managing concentrated chaos. Fingertips that don’t feel heat anymore. Relentless exhaustion. Sweat. So much sweat.

And at the end of these days, she gets to go home, peel off her soaked clothes, and take a shower that is colder than the arctic ocean itself. Which is not quite so cold these days but, the point still stands. She dries herself off half-heartedly, plops into bed, and sleeps.

She survived another day.