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The Sunday Paper: “Blood Come” by Ryan Adam Murray. Part 5 of 7.

The door creaks, and I hear the sound of wheels on the floor once more. It takes a few minutes to sink in. The words are swirling around my brain. They trigger a memory. Bandula.

All of a sudden, I am very awake.

If Bandula is here, then it’s five a.m. If it’s five a.m. then I missed the meat order. If I missed the meat order, I might as well go home, douse myself in gasoline, light a match and escape whatever fate the Chef will have in store for me when he finds out. And he will find out. From Ted.

I hear a key in the lock of the front door. I feel like my heart is about to burst through my chest. The shame of fucking this up is bad enough, but to have to admit it to him — to that preposterous, despicable, shit-bag weasel — is more than I can handle. But I’m going to have to handle it. Because Ted is here.

My mind races. Is there an excuse? There’s no excuse. I fucked up. That’s all there is to it. I cannot, will not, try to cover this up. Ted offered to pick up the order for me, and I fell asleep.  Even if there were some plausible explanation, denial goes against every one of my principles. If I squirm out from under this, I’d be no better than Ted. Well… that’s going too far, I’d still be better than Ted, but I’m not doing it. Suddenly, I feel strangely at peace. I’m going to stick to my guns. I know what kind of person I am. I’ll admit my mistake and suffer the consequences. I have to, I fucked up. In a way, I feel kind of good. It’s terrible that I missed the meat order, but at least I’m not a weasel.

Ted waves as he walks past my booth.

“Hey there, buddy! Had a couple last night, eh?” he chortles with laugher. “Let’s go back and have a look at what we’ve got!”

I follow fast on his heels through the kitchen door.

“Ted, wait,” I hold up my hands. Bandula is behind him. Later on, when I look back on that morning, I will remember that I saw him mopping the floor, but my brain doesn’t process it. I am still tired, in shock from my mistake, and wrapped up in weird self-righteous bliss about my sudden decision to do the right thing.

“Ted, wait,” I hold up my hands. “I have to tell you something.”

“No,” Ted is astonished. “You don’t mean…”

He puts a lot of weight on that word, ‘don’t.’

“I know. I fucked up. I can’t believe it. I wasn’t even drunk, I swear, I just fell asleep,” the calm swells within me. I am totally zen. I have to confess. It only makes sense to confess to a person I hate. That’s real repentance, right? I mean, any sad act mother-fucker can confess to someone who they know will forgive them. It takes balls to confess to a person who you know will fuck you over. I have balls. I am at peace. “I just don’t know what to say. I feel terrible.”

Ted giggles. Ted chuckles. Ted guffaws.

I begin to feel less at peace.

“I can’t believe you- after I even said-” he stammers through his laughter. “I even gave you a way out and you were too dumb to take it.”

My stomach flips and flops as blood fills his head. His face is red now, and slowly darkening into that nauseating shade of swollen penis-purple that haunts me even when it isn’t there. His wretched sore of a mouth twisting around that ridiculous laugh and I am seething with disgust.

“Well yeah, it was pretty dumb I guess,” saying that stings, but I fucked up big time. I have no right to dignity at this moment. “I’m sorry.”

I begin to feel even less at peace.

“Way to go,” Ted howled, “Mr. ‘sous chef!’’

When he says the words ‘sous chef,’ he raise his hands.

He arches his fingers. Those little quotation marks in the air, a gesture that calls the legitimacy of my position into question. Everything would be different if he hadn’t done that. He crossed the line. I don’t want to hurt Ted. I don’t want to punch him in the face. I don’t want to fight him. I just want him to know that he has gone too far.

I shove him.

Maybe, just maybe, if there were been a bright yellow ‘Caution: Wet Floor’ sign in the middle of the room I would put two and two together. But there isn’t, and I don’t.

Sometimes I hear, when people experience a traumatic event that changes their life forever, they remember it in slow motion. That doesn’t happen to me. I don’t even know what I saw. Ted takes a step back to keep his balance and all of a sudden his feet are in the air and his head is on the floor. The laughter stops. Bandula approaches the scene and stares.

I stare too. I gape.

Ted’s head is tilted against the floor on an angle that indicated that his skull has been partially crushed. The lowered drains underneath the sink, designed to absorb the overflow from the dishwasher, begin to slurp on the gushing, crimson river forming from the day supervisor. I have never seen anything like it. It’s like a tidal wave. Who knew the dick could have so much blood in him? Ted’s eyes and mouth are wide open. His purple head — twisted into a grimace, half of laughter, half of astonishment — slowly begins to lose its color.

Wooden Rocket Press’ Sunday Paper posts new serialized fiction each Sunday. Return next Sunday morning for the next section of Blood Come. For other stories check out the Sunday Paper archive.

To submit your story for consideration for the Sunday Paper:

e-mail us at submissions@woodenrocketpress.com.

The Sunday Paper: “Blood Come” by Ryan Adam Murray. Part 4 of 7.

As we’re cleaning up afterward, Amanda comes charging through the doors with a concerned look on her face. She’s been busy tonight so she hasn’t been in the kitchen much, which is a shame because the window between the line and the servers is positioned to perfectly obscure our faces when she’s standing at the counter. This means we can stare at her tits with total impunity. It’s nice.

“He’s here,” she hisses at me. “Look out!”

“Who’s here?” I’m confused. It’s too late for the Chef or the owners to be hanging around, and there’s no way any reviewer worth their salt would waste time on this place. Not on a Wednesday, anyway.

“Ted!” she whispers.

“Oh…” I would bury my face in my palm if it weren’t oily and bloodstained.

“That’s just fuckin’ spectacular.”

“Hey,” says Jack, eyeing Amanda. “That sounds like bad news. If you need someone to comfort you or, you know, have wild sex with, I’m right here.”

She smiles sweetly.  “If that’s what I need, Jack, you’re the first person I’ll call,” Amanda says.

“Really?” Jack says, surprised.

“Not really,” she admits, and exits the kitchen.

“Don’t feel bad, man, you know she has a boyfriend.” Nick slides over to Jack, putting a friendly hand on his inner-thigh and running it up his leg, making Jack jump to avoid having his balls fondled. His tone though is conciliatory. “And you know he’s a douche bag. Some guy who thinks he’s better than everyone ‘cause he’s never been drunk on mouthwash or shit his-self in public. You know the type.”

Nick slaps his own nuts, wistfully.

“Nick is right,” Bandula says. “She have no want for Jack and his fuck. That’s why he give the fuck to little boys,” he looks up at the invisible figure of authority, once again going into analytical mode. “To them, he feel a man. To woman, his cock is like cock of the baby.” The dishwasher makes a sympathetic face, and tries to comfort the rejected cook. “Jack?” he asks, rubbing his hands together and frowning. “Want whore? I get whores. Cheap too. You need woman who can make baby cock feel like the black adder inside. Cheap whore? She ocean of cock. Her fuck good for you.”

“Thanks man,” Jack says, with genuine gratitude. “But it’s gotta be Amanda. Boyfriend or not. Just ‘cause there’s a goalie don’t mean you can’t score.”

“What’s this now?” Fuck me. It’s his voice. I knew it was coming. He must have been standing just outside the door to the kitchen. Ted swaggers into the room, a pint in one hand and a clipboard in the other. Why does he need a clipboard, you ask? The answer is that he doesn’t, but he always carries it with him. Whenever I need to ask him a work related question he likes to hold up one finger, like a conductor chastising a particularly rough crowd into silence at a cello recital in a bad neighborhood, and contemplate the clipboard for a few minutes before responding. “This doesn’t sound like a discussion appropriate to the workplace,” Ted pauses meaningfully, and then erupts in that hideous guffaw as blood fills his head and face, twisting it into a purple leer. “I’m just kiddin’! I won’t rat you out,” he gives Jack a conspiratorial nod. “I had a dream about her last night.”

He says it the way that a normal person would say, I just got my Ph.D. in Quantum Physics, or I was just awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, or my sculpture of Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. is being displayed at the United Nations summit.

“She was naked,” Ted adds, with a wink. Then he bursts into peals of stupid laughter as Peter comes in.

The bartender gives me a telling look.

“You can’t drink in the kitchen,” Peter tells Ted, “and you’re not working right now. You really shouldn’t be in here.”

“These guys are my buddies!” Ted is thoroughly indignant. “We’re just shootin’ the breeze.”

God forbid I let him know I don’t like him. If I did that I’d end up in a forty-five minute meaning where well-meaning owner number one and well-meaning owner number two would sit Ted and I down and try to ‘work things out.’ This would end up making me look like an asshole, and Ted look like a nice guy who got treated badly when he was just trying to help. I’m not taking the bait.

“We’re buddies,” I say, shooting Peter a ‘what the fuck do you want me to say?’ look. “Don’t worry about it.” The bartender glares at me, and leaves.

“So,” Ted says, appropriating a businesslike tone, flipping through the bills from the rush. “I see that Amanda ordered a couple of steaks and a nacho twenty minutes ago. Did you make those for her?”

“No,” I say. “I kicked her in the box and told her to go fuck herself. It’s okay. We have an understanding.”

From the pit I hear Bandula hoot with laughter. The dishwasher could care less about Ted. He stays out of Bandula’s way. They never speak to each other.

Ted stares at me for a second. Then he guffaws again, but this time it’s forced. “You’re quick,” he observes. “That’s funny.” He says it as if he was making an accusation. He says it like a normal person would say, you seem to be shitting on my foot. He examines his clipboard for a moment. Nick pipes up.

“Hey Ted, I was just noticin’ the mashed potatoes today,” Ted can’t see his face. Nick is looking at me with a wicked grin. He applies the palm to his crotch and winks. “How do you make them so smooth?”

Jesus fucking Christ.

For what feels like an eternity, Ted talks. No, Ted explains. He explains that the secret to making mashed potatoes is that you have to, and for your sake I’ll paraphrase here, you have to mash the potatoes. Ted does have one talent. It’s the ability to stretch the incredibly fucking obvious into a twenty-minute speech. When he finally runs out of steam he heads back to the bar for another beer. I’m sort of impressed with Nick. He did keep Ted distracted for a while. Distracting Ted by getting him to talk about himself isn’t exactly the most difficult task in the world, but the bar is low for Nick. He had a good idea. I’m going to give him credit.

“Fucking asshole,” Jack snarls as Ted leaves. “At least he won’t ‘rat me out,’ though.” Jack’s voice is heavy with sarcasm. He’s going to hear about the Amanda shit from the Chef tomorrow. We both know it.

Re-beered, Ted comes back. I hear him saying something to Peter, followed by the guffaw. “You’ve got a good sense of humor, bud,” he tosses over his shoulder as he returns to the kitchen. If Ted is telling you that you have a good sense of humor, it’s probably because he just said something incredibly rude and obnoxious that he’s trying to pass off as a joke. Don’t get me wrong, we talk a lot of shit in the kitchen, but we’re all on the same side. When Bandula threatens me with rape and murder, I can take it as playful camaraderie. He’s sure as hell never going to go to the Chef or the owners with stories about me, no matter what happens back here. Ted is a crybaby and a tattletale. Whatever you say to him is likely to be repeated to upper management. That takes the fun out of it.

“The real reason I’m here,” Ted reveals. “Is that I have to tell you something,” he gestures to me with two fingers. The ‘come here,’ gesture. Livid, I lean over.

“What?” I hiss the word at him.

“The Chef asked me to ask you to pick up a meat order. It gets to the market-” I wave my hand brusquely in Ted’s face.

“He called. He told me,” I have no time for this. “Seriously? He told you to come here and tell me that?”

Ted stiffens.

“I was led to believe that was my responsibility,” he says, coldly. “I take my responsibilities very seriously,” he gives me a meaningful look, and taps his clipboard with a pen. “You know,” a gentle note creeps into Ted’s voice, “I’m used to gettin’ up in the morning. If you like, I can take care of it for you.”

Oh. Hell. No. Giving a task that the Chef entrusted me with to this suckhole would be tantamount to abandoning my position entirely. I’d never hear the end of it.

“That’s fine,” I manage a smile. “I have the situation under control.”

A shadow passes over Ted’s face. Oh, I get it. This is why he’s here. If he picks up the meat order he can go on and on to the Chef, the owners, to anyone who will listen about how the sous can’t control the kitchen when the Chef is away, the sous can’t be trusted to drag himself out of bed to do important work, the sous pawns off his responsibilities on Ted, the under-paid culinary genius rotting away on the day shift. The plan, shoddy, and transparent as it is, becomes crystal clear to me.

“You’re sure?” he asks.

“I am,” I say.

“Okay,” Ted gulps his beer. “I’ll be in to check on you in the morning.” He leaves. At last.

“He’ll be in to check on you, huh?” Jack throws a carrot stick at me. “Just to make sure everything’s running smoothly, right?”

“Shut up,” I mutter.

After we get everything cleaned up and put away, the three of us sit at the bar across from Peter. The place is closed but he’s still pouring. Bandula left. He has to be back in the morning. Jack and Nick are halfway drunk already, and I’m nursing a beer. “Four a.m. huh?” Peter shakes his head, “that’s brutal. Are you even going to sleep?”

“Fuck that,” I say. “What’s the point? I’ll just hang around here until three thirty. I know where the place is, and it’s not far. I can stumble over there, grab the meat order, and stumble home. No problem.”

To this day, I don’t know what happened. I’ve worked nights for years, so I normally go to bed around 6 a.m. I’m never even tired at four. Never mind at… well, whenever I finally fell asleep. Overconfidence. That was my problem. I was just so pissed that Ted would question my ability to get this very simple task done, I felt defiant. When the first wave of sleepiness swept over me, I didn’t even fight it. I leaned back in one of the booths, put my feet up, and decided to rest my eyes. I’d make it. That scruffy penis thinks he can question me? Fuck him.

The next thing I become aware of is a distant sound. Wheels on bare floor. The mop bucket in the kitchen. I hear it, but I don’t realize what it means right away. The sound stops. The door creaks open. Footsteps are coming toward me. I don’t want to open my eyes. I just hope that whoever it is won’t try to disturb me.

Then, a voice. “Beware,” it says. “The cock of failure.”

Wooden Rocket Press’ Sunday Paper posts new serialized fiction each Sunday. Return next Sunday morning for the next section of Blood Come. For other stories check out the Sunday Paper archive.

To submit your story for consideration for the Sunday Paper:

e-mail us at submissions@woodenrocketpress.com.

Book Review: Boris Robot of Leisure, Vol. 3 & 4. By Katharine Miller

ROL Vol. 3: Boris Gets A Visitor
ROL Vol. 4: Boris Takes A Nap
By Katharine Miller
Vol. 3 – 101 pages, Vol. 4- 98 pages.
http://www.robotofleisure.com

Well, it’s been almost a year since I read a Bot’ O’ Leisure book and, since author Katharine Miller officially became Canada’s Own Katharine Miller yesterday, I thought I’d celebrate with a quick review the latest of Boris’ offerings. I’ve writen quite a bit about my admiration of Miller’s work already. I gush about her styalistic ellegence here, and spend a lot of time trying to make myself sound smart in phylosophy here. But you clicked this link looking for a short book review, and probably don’t want to ramble over an extra thousand words of my writing, so let me summarize thusly: Boris is sort of a newspaper strip about about The Jetsons as re-imagined by Samuel Beckett. I think that’s a fair discription of the little robot with whom the early twentieth century, Irish nihilist in me first fell in love, and the latest volumes of Miller’s text-less, cartoon series continue in this same, excellent philosophical vein; exploring simply, and usefully the profound joys and sadnesses associated with mundane activity.

In Boris Gets A Visitor, our hero tries, rather unsuccessfully, to impart some of his accumulated wisdom to another of his kind. The story shares the moral of Herman Hess’ Siddhartha, that while many things can be explained, nothing can ever be taught. In Boris Takes A Nap,  our robot has grown board with the common endeavors that once thrilled him, and expands his conscious experience into the realm of impossible dreams. Miller is once again using the perfect absurdity of her adorable robot to explore a fundamental truth of the human condition; in this case, that it is impossible for the normal mind to remain joyfully focused on its true circumstance.

“All his life has he looked away… to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was. Hmm? What he was doing.”

-Yoda, Star Wars V: The Empire Strikes Back.

Thankfully, Miller also realises, in these newer works, that she has already been leaning on her cute cartoons and philosophical dexterity for two hundred pages. While ROL 1 and 2 were both deeply enjoyable experiences, she wasn’t going to get much more mileage (actually, given that she’s a citizen now, let’s say Kilometerage) out of the character without introducing a more exciting, and perhaps more literary, external conflict. She’s solved this problem beautifully, by introducing an element that my aforementioned hero Beckett spent his entire career deliberately avoiding, back-story.

The absence of all senescent life in the Boris universe was something I had been taking for granted. I was passively curious about it. I made a few casual guesses about what might have happened to all the people, but I’d seen Endgame, I knew that it didn’t mater. The end of the world, I thought, was not the story, simply a necessary stage for the performance of it. It seem, however, that I was wrong. I am shocked, awed and sincerely excited (as I suppose Boris must be) discover some clues. Not only clues to the mystery of Boris’ existence, but possibly clues to the mystery the ghost town where he resides. I’m all a tingle to think that Boris, the robot with human drives and yearnings, may be about to uncover an answer to one of the most fundamental human questions: Where Do I Come From?

Please read all of Miller’s books, and join me, in hot anticipation of the upcoming ROL. 5: Boris Meets His Maker.