Hart House Review - 2004
Shift Work
by Sierra Bellows

Sparkling chemical sweetness dusts cracked lips and false teeth. Her tongue, red blue veined, flicks out and then in with the taste of icing sugar. Mouthful of white flour pastry sticks to her palate, her dental work, bridges, structures of metal. She lights a cigarette, the match between too long, too red nails. She snaps her wrist and the burnt match flies into a cheap plastic ashtray. Smoke rushes into her, then gushing hot coffee, hot enough to scald the flesh of fingers, forearms. She consumes it, quickly, all at once. The Customer.

Grind coffee. Place paper filter. Rinse pot. Pour water into grating. Rearrange product. Stack cups. Restock bags. Wipe counter. Lucy watches her hands as they fulfill these small tasks, touching the buttons, the handles, the cool moist J-cloth. She uses waxed paper when she lifts the pastries, the Product, moving them into rows to display their Technicolor glazes. She considers the elegance of her own movements, the reflected florescent bulbs in her clear nail lacquer.

“Two large coffees double double to go.”

She glances upward, past the cash register, then moves the bottom of her face into a closed-lipped smile. Pouring the coffee with one hand, she grabs two plastic lids with the other then pushes them over the Styrofoam rims of the cups. The cash beeps as she presses the Lrg Coffee button twice. Subtotal.

“Two forty six please.” His hand brushes hers with the exchange of coins.“Thank you. Fifty-four cents is your change. Come again. Have a nice day.”

Two quarters. Four pennies. She slides them onto the Formica counter top. She does not register his face even as she beams into it with the foggy benevolence of customer service. She is not simply a purveyor of refined sugar and caffeine; she is a source of polite goodwill that flows outward into the universe. She imagines every customer as a potential suicide victim. A smile, a nice word is their salvation and she is their savior. The Employee.

It’s eleven seventeen in the morning.

The donut shop is the only place on the street that allows smoking, so the rejects of the fashionably healthy yuppie restaurants and those who look unattractive even under soft focus track lighting come to sit here for hours, for afternoons. Some come every day. She imagines their homes so unpleasant that they would chose to come instead to sit at tables sticky with the fingerprints of strangers. She imagines them as lonely people without families or friends, people who watch TV for companionship.

Turning her back to the till, she surveys the racks of donuts. Bavarian cream, cruller, double chocolate, sour cream, honey raisin, honey-dipped, chocolate iced, and jellies of the cherry, lemon, and grape variety. They don’t look like food; they are ornamentation in outdated colours. They are the food of machines, of creatures of shining plastics. Their smooth finishes look discordant against the imperfection of those who consume them.

It is eleven twenty-nine. Lucy takes a cherry-jelly-filled and stands, just outside of sight from the dining room, in the doorway between the backroom and the service area behind the counter. She licks the powdered sugar off the donut’s beige flesh. When she first started working here she swore not to eat the goods after she had seen the yellowish lard being folded into the dough. She bites into the donut to expose its gooey red heart. The jelly taste tingles sour in her mouth. She licks the red preserve out of the round orifice in the middle of the donut than throws the rest into the economy-sized commercial garbage bag. When the shop closes at night the unsold donuts all meet a similar fate inside dark, black bags. She takes pleasure in crushing them in her fists and covering her hands in jams and cream fillings as she tumbles them into the trash. Small deaths.

The man with the crocked mouth comes through the glass doors. He is one of her favourites. His skin looks slightly transparent, like it was powdered onto his face, like his eyeballs would be visible even under closed lids. She thinks he is a heroine addict. Burnt matches and a used syringe in the toilet and now whenever he comes in she stares at him, telepathically probing, looking in his eyes for a sign that it was him. The syringe had the needle broken off, on purpose. She gives him special privileges, a size larger coffee than he’s ordered, a donut when he’s a quarter short. When he forgets his change she always calls him back.

He asks for coffee, no cream, four sugars. His eyes focus somewhere within her head. The regulars are mostly like that; they don’t seem to be looking at the corporal world. He places his cup on a table near the back, then heads for the bathroom. When he walks he leaves in his wake the scent of incense.

She resets the coffee maker. She restocks the stir sticks, fetches a new box of napkins from the storeroom. Jots creamers on the order list. She is the goddess of fertility, the harvest saint, she creates anew these things for her children, her customers who eat and destroy and dispose of that which come from her pristine. White, smooth virgin napkins. Coffee warm and sweet as mother’s milk.

Eleven thirty-six. She checks the time every ten minutes though she tries not to, time goes faster when she isn’t looking. Disdainful of time, she holds contempt for minutes that slither, and seconds that tick-tock backwards, then forwards, and backwards again. She begins to wish that she could black out, fulfilling her duties without consciousness then wake just as her shift ends. An alternate personality animating her body from ten to six. Merciful possession.

The lady with the orange lipstick slaps her money on the counter, exactly one o’six in small change, dimes and nickels, dull like they’d been sitting in a jar on a dresser. It is exactly one o’six because that is the price of a senior’s large coffee including tax and if one were to forget that the orange mouthed lady deserves her seniors discount and charge her one twenty three she is allowed to yell. People like the tangerine lipped lady are easier for Lucy to think about because she doesn’t have to worry about bad things happening to them. The burden of possible injury on the iced sidewalks, food poisoning, and crossed-eyes does not lay heavily on her heart in the instance of this woman and her unnatural colouring.

“Thanks Bob.” The woman smirks as she turns toward her regular table, coffee cup clutched in both of her thin, spidery hands. Lucy takes off her false nametag. She refuses to wear the tag she was issued when she was hired. LUCILLE printed in bold pink lettering under the store logo. Strangers, nameless, vaguely threatening in their anonymity, do not need to know her first name. She wears the names of past employees, donut store ghosts.

It is eleven forty seven. The beginning of the lunch crowd has gathered on the other side of the counter, those who require refined sugar instead of meals. They shuffle, fumbling with the change in their pockets, staring above Lucy’s head until they must address her directly. They smell faintly of car exhaust, of the outside air that they have brought inside nestled in the creases of their clothing. Their lips move as they decide what to order.

“One large coffee black and a dozen donuts.”

“Would you like to chose them?”

“Uh... two honey crullers, two chocolate sourdoughs, three lemon filled, two of those ones with the cross-hatching… no, the ones over there. One maple. One chocolate dipped. One with the pink icing, with the sprinkles.”

Lucy lines them up inside a box, crushing them slightly against each other to make them fit. “Seven thirty-nine, please.” She tapes down the top.“Thank you. Two sixty-one is your change. Come again. Have a nice day. Next please.”

“Four coffees. Mediums. Give me some sugars and some creamers. Some Sweet and Lows. Some stir sticks.”

Lucy reaches under the cash to where the creamers and sugars are stashed beyond the reach of the customers. Discarding an imploded creamer with one hand, she pours coffee with the other.

“Four sixty, please” Such a familiar script.“Thank you. Two sixty-one is your change. Have a good day. Next please.”

“I’d like three coffees in a travel tray and a half dozen.”

Lucy repeats the order in her head as she fills it so that she will not make a mistake. Orders are always simple sentences constructed with short words and small numbers.“Next please.”

“I’ll have a double double to go.”

“A cinnamon.”

“A box of donut holes. Twenty of ‘em. And a coffee. Make that two.”

“I’ve got a list. OK, two dozen donuts. One dozen all Boston Cream. The second box a mix. Five large coffees. Two decafs. One tea.”

Lucy scrambles to fold two large boxes along their pre-marked edges. There are only eleven Boston Creams, a chocolate covered lemon cream is substituted. The bottoms of the cups are ever so slightly larger than the tray opening and the coffee sloshes up against the plastic lids when the cups are forced into their holders. Lucy places the taped boxes into a pink and white plastic bag then gathers both the bag and the drink trays in her hands. She pulls her face into a slight smile and holds out her arms toward her customer. She is the only constant; the Product and the Customer change. She never hands out the same stir stick twice.

Her eyelids slide down over the surface of her eyes until her upper and lower eyelashes meet and interlace, then they open. Synapses snap and fizzle, little sparks leaping from one neuron to the next along wet wiring of memory traces she will never recall. Millions upon millions of cells quiver and hum, consuming their edibles, discarding their junk, building their manufacturables, eating their enemies, and performing their invisible miracles. Within each cell is the protein memory of ancestors, of the whole before the split and the whole before the split, a physical joining to the parents, the grandparents. This is the trace of generations of men and women, each of whom lived lives of building and collecting small empires of ideas and things. She is the pinnacle of evolution up to this moment. Everything has led to this. Outside the donut shop, everyone Lucy has ever met is out there. They are picking their teeth, they are moldering underground, they are making love, they are sitting on the toilet. People she will meet are being born. Now. Right now. Each second, when lived by six billion people lasts one hundred and ninety years. Lucy has been alive without interruption for nineteen years; her heart always beating, her blood always rushing, her breath always warm.

It is one o’clock.

Lucy pours water into grating in the top of the coffee machine. She re-stacks the cups.

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Shift Work COPYRIGHT © Sierra Bellows, 2003