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2023.06.03 15:38 obeliskposture Short story about bad times & bad jobs
I've shared fiction here before and it didn't go altogether too poorly, so I'm going to press my luck and do it again. This was written about a year ago, and I'm tired of trying to peddle it to lit magazines. Might as well share it here, know that it met a few eyeballs, and have done with it.
It's relevant to the sub insofar as it's about urban alienation and the working conditions at a small business run by IN THIS HOUSE WE BELIEVE people. (I tried to pitch it as a story of the great resignation with a momentary flicker of cosmic horror.) It's based on a similar job I took on after getting laid off during the lockdown, and the circumstances of the main character's breakup are faintly similar to one I went through several years back (her job sucked the life out of her).
Without further ado:
* * *
It was getting close to midnight, and the temperature outside was still above 80 degrees. We’d locked up the shop at 10:15 and walked over to Twenty, the dive bar on Poplar Street, where a single wall-mounted air conditioner and four wobbly ceiling fans weren’t putting up much resistance against the July heat baking the place from the outside and the dense mass of bodies giving it a stifling fever from within.
Just now I came close to saying it was a Wednesday night, because that was usually when the cyclists descended upon Avenue Brew, the gritty-but-bougie craft beer and sandwich shop I was working at back then. Every Wednesday between March and November, about fifteen to twenty-five Gen Xers dressed in skintight polyester, all packages and camel toes and fanny packs, locked up their thousand-dollar bikes on the sidewalk and lined up for IPAs and paninis. They reliably arrived around 8:00, an hour before we closed, making it impossible to get started on the closing checklist and leave on time at 10:00. The worst of them were demanding and rude, and even the best got raucous and stubborn after a couple drinks. There were nights when bringing in the sidewalk tables couldn’t be done without arguing with them. Most were sub-par tippers, to boot.
After Wednesday came and went that week without so much as a single 40-something in Ray Bans and padded shorts stopping in to double-fist two cans of Jai Alai, we dared to hope the cyclists had chosen another spot to be their finish line from there on out. But no—they’d only postponed their weekly ride, and swarmed us on Friday night instead.
I was the last person to find out; I was clocked in as purchaser that evening. The position was something like a promotion I'd received a year earlier: for twenty hours a week, I got to retreat from the public and sit in the back room with the store laptop, reviewing sales and inventory, answering emails from brewery reps, and ordering beer, beverages, and assorted paper goods. When I put in hours as purchaser, my wage went up from $11 to $15 an hour, but I was removed from the tip pool. On most days, tips amounted to an extra two or three dollars an hour, so I usually came out ahead.
This was back in 2021. I don't know what Avenue Brew pays these days.
Anyway, at about 8:15, I stepped out to say goodbye to everyone and found the shop in chaos. Friday nights were generally pretty active, the cyclists' arrival had turned the place into a mob scene. The line extended to the front door. The phone was ringing. The Grubhub tablet dinged like an alarm clock without a snooze button. Danny was on the sandwich line and on the verge of losing his temper. Oliver was working up a sweat running food, bussing tables, and replenishing ingredients from the walk-in. The unflappable Marina was on register, and even she seemed like she was about to snap at somebody.
What else could I do? I stayed until closing to answer the phone, process Grubhub orders, hop on and off the second register, and help Danny with sandwich prep. After the tills were counted out, I stayed another hour to take care of the dishes, since nobody had a chance to do a first load. Oliver was grateful, even though he grumbled about having to make some calls and rearrange Sunday's schedule so I could come in a couple hours late. Irene and Jeremy, Avenue Brew's owners, would kick his ass if he let me go into overtime.
Danny suggested that we deserved a few drinks ourselves after managing to get through the shift without killing anyone. Not even Marina could find a reason to disagree with him.
The neighborhood had undergone enough gentrification to support an upscale brunch spot, an ice cream parlor, a gourmet burger restaurant, a coffee and bahn mi shop, and Avenue Brew (to name a few examples), but not yet quite enough that the people who staffed them couldn’t afford to live within a ten-minute walk from the main avenue where all these hep eateries stood between 24-hour corner stores with slot machines in back, late-night Chinese and Mexico-Italian takeout joints with bulletproof glass at the counters, and long-shuttered delis and shoe stores. Twenty on Poplar was the watering hole set aside for people like us. It was dim, a bit dilapidated, and inexpensive, and usually avoided by denizens of the condos popping up on the vacant lots and replacing clusters of abandoned row houses.
When we arrived, Kyle waved us over. He didn’t work at Avenue Brew anymore, but still kept up with a few of us. He was at Twenty at least four nights out of the week.
So there we all were. I sat with a brooding stranger freestyling to himself in a low mumble on the stool to my left and Oliver on my right, who tapped at his phone and nursed a bottle of Twisted Tea. To Oliver’s right sat Marina, staring at nothing in particular and trying to ignore Danny, who stood behind her, closer than she would have liked, listening to Kyle explain the crucial differences between the Invincible comic book and the Invincible web series.
I recall being startled back to something like wakefulness when it seemed to me that the ceiling had sprouted a new fan. I blinked my eyes, and it wasn’t there anymore. It reminded me of an incident from when I was still living with my folks in South Jersey and still had a car, and was driving home from a friend’s house party up in Bergen County. It was 6:30 AM, I hadn’t slept all night, and needed to get home so I could get at least little shuteye before heading to Whole Foods for my 11:00 AM shift. I imagined I passed beneath the shadows of overpasses I knew weren’t there, and realized I was dreaming at the wheel.
I was pretty thoroughly zombified at that point. Heather and I had broken up for good the night before, and I hadn't gotten even a minute of sleep. Calling out at Avenue Brew was tough. Unless you found someone willing to cover your shift on like six hours' notice, you were liable to get a writeup, a demotion, or your hours cut if you couldn't produce a doctor's note. So I loaded up on caffeine pills and Five-Hour Energy bottles at the corner store, and powered through as best I could.
I finished the last thimbleful of Blue Moon in my glass. Oliver wiped the sweat from the back of his neck with a napkin and covered his mouth to stifle a laugh at the KiwiFarms thread he was scrolling through. Pool balls clacked; somebody swore and somebody laughed. The TouchTunes box was playing Bob Dylan’s “Rain Day Woman #12 & 35,” and enough bleary 40-something men around the bar were bobbing their heads and mouthing the words to make it impossible to determine which one of them paid two bucks to hear it. A guy by the cigarette machine who looked like a caricature of Art Carney in flannel and an old Pixies T-shirt was accosting a woman who must have been a toddler when he hit drinking age, and she momentarily made eye contact with me as she scanned the area for a way out. Danny was shouting over the bartender’s head, carrying on a conversation with the Hot Guy from Pizza Stan’s, who was sitting on the horseshoe’s opposite arm.
I never got his name, but when Oliver first referred to him as the Hot Guy from Pizza Stan’s, I knew exactly who he meant. Philly scene kid par excellence. Mid-20s, washed-out black denim, dyed black hair, thick bangs, and dark, gentle eyes. He was only truly alluring when he was on the job, because he seldom smiled then—and when he smiled, he broke the spell by exposing his teeth, stained a gnarly shade of mahogany from too much smoking and not enough brushing.
“How’s Best? Marcus still a joker?” Danny asked him.
“Yeah, you know Marcus. You know how he is.”
So the Hot Guy had been working at Best Burger (directly across the street from Avenue Brew) ever since Pizza Stan’s owners mismanaged the place unto insolvency. (Afterwards it was renovated and reopened as a vegan bakery—which incidentally closed down about a month ago.) Danny used to work at Best Burger, but that ended after he got into a shouting match with the owner. I happened to overhear it while I was dragging in the tables and collecting the chairs from the sidewalk the night it happened. It wasn’t any of my business, and I tried not to pay attention, but they were really tearing into each other. A month later, Oliver welcomed Danny aboard at Avenue Brew. I hadn’t known he’d been interviewed, and by then it was too late to mention the incident. But I’d have been a hypocrite to call it a red flag after the way I resigned from my position as Café Chakra's assistant manager two years earlier—not that we need to go dredging that up right now. Let's say there was some bad blood and leave it at that.
Anyway, I was thinking about giving in and buying a pack of cigarettes from the machine—and then remembered that Twenty didn’t have a cigarette machine. I looked again. The Art Carney-lookalike was still there, fingering his phone with a frown, but the girl was gone—and so was the cigarette machine.
I had only a moment to puzzle over this before Danny clapped me on the shoulder and thrust a shot glass in front of me.
“Starfish!” he said. (Danny called me Starfish. Everybody else called me Pat.) “You look like you need some juice.”
He distributed shots to everyone else. Marina declined hers, but changed her mind when Kyle offered to take it instead.
She and Kyle had stopped sleeping together after Kyle left Avenue Brew to work at the Victory taproom on the Parkway, but Marina was still concerned about his bad habits, which Danny delighted in encouraging.
We all leaned in to clink our glasses. Before I could find an appropriate moment to ask Marina if I could bum a cigarette, she got up to visit the bathroom. Danny took her seat and bowed his head for a conspiratorial word with Kyle.
I watched from the corner of my eye and tried to listen in. Like Marina, I was a little worried about Kyle. He got hired at Avenue Brew around the same time I did, just before the pandemic temporarily turned us into a takeout joint. He was a senior at Drexel then, an English major, and sometimes talked about wanting to either find work in publishing or carve out a career as a freelance writer after graduating. But first he intended to spend a year getting some life in before submitting himself to the forever grind.
He read a lot of Charles Bukowski and Hunter Thompson. He relished the gritty and sordid, and had already been good at sniffing it out around the neighborhood and in West Philly before Danny introduced him to cocaine, casinos, strip clubs, and a rogue’s gallery of shady but fascinating people. (None were really Danny’s friends; just fellow passengers who intersected with the part of his life where he sometimes went to Parx, sometimes came out ahead, sometimes spent his winnings on coke, and sometimes did bumps at titty bars.) Kyle recounted these adventures with a boyish enthusiasm for the naked reality of sleaze, like a middle schooler telling his locker room buddies about catching his older brother in flagrante and seeing so-and-so body parts doing such-and-such things.
Marina hated it. She never said as much to me, but she was afraid that the template Kyle set for his life during his “year off” was in danger of becoming locked in. The anniversary of his graduation had already passed, and now here he was trying to convince Danny to contribute a couple hundred dollars toward a sheet of acid his guy had for sale. He wasn't doing much writing lately.
I was the oldest employee at Avenue Brew (as I write this I’m 37, but fortunately I don’t look it), and when Kyle still worked with us I felt like it was my prerogative to give him some advice. The longer he waited to make inroads, I once told him, the more likely he’d be seen as damaged goods by the publishing world. He needed to jam his foot in the door while he was still young.
I could tell the conversation bored him, and didn’t bring up the subject again.
The bartender took my glass and curtly asked if I’d like another drink.
“No thanks, not yet,” I answered.
She slid me my bill.
I missed the old bartender, the one she’d replaced. I forget her name, but she was ingenuous and energetic and sweet. Pretty much everyone had some sort of crush on her. Sometimes she came into Avenue Brew for lunch, and tipped us as well as we tipped her. Maybe three months before that night—Danny witnessed it—she suddenly started crying and rushed out the door. Everyone at the bar mutely looked to each other for an explanation. (Fortunately for Twenty, the kitchen manager hadn’t left yet, and picked up the rest of her shift.)
She never came back. None of us had seen her since. But drafts still had to be poured and bottlecaps pulled off, and now here was another white woman in her mid-twenties wearing a black tank top, a pushup bra, and a scrunchie, same as before. Twenty’s regulars grew accustomed to not expecting to see the person she’d replaced, and life went on.
“How’re you doing?” I asked Oliver, just to say something to somebody, and to keep my thoughts from wandering back to Heather.
“Just kind of existing right now,” he answered. His phone lay face-up on the counter. He was swiping through Instagram, and I recognized the avatar of the user whose album he hate-browsed.
“And how’s Austin been?” I asked.
“Oh, you know. Not even three weeks after getting over the jetlag from his trip back from the Cascades, he’s off touring Ireland.” He shook his head. “Living his best life.”
He’d hired Austin on a part-time basis in September. We needed a new associate when Emma was promoted to replace a supervisor who'd quit without even giving his two weeks. There was a whole thing. I'm having a hard time recalling the guy's name, but I liked him well enough. He was a good worker and he seemed like a bright kid, but he was—well, he was young. Naïve. One day he found Jeremy sitting in the back room with his laptop, and took advantage of the open-door policy to ask why the store manager and supervisors didn’t get health benefits or paid time off. Jeremy told him it "was being worked on," and that he couldn’t discuss it any further at that time. I understand the kid got argumentative, though I never knew precisely what was said.
Irene started visiting the shop a lot more often after that, almost always arriving when the kid was working. No matter what he was doing, she’d find a reason to intervene, to micromanage and harangue him, and effectively make his job impossible. A coincidence, surely.
It’s something I still think about. By any metric, Jeremy and Irene have done very well for themselves. They’re both a little over 40 years old. I remember hearing they met at law school. In addition to Avenue Brew, they own a bistro in Francisville and an ice cream parlor in Point Breeze. They have a house on the Blue Line, send their son to a Montessori school, and pull up to their businesses in a white Volkswagen ID.4. But whenever the subject of benefits, wages, or even free shift meals came up, they pled poverty. It simply couldn’t be done. But they liked to remind us about all they did to make Avenue Brew a fun place to work, like let the staff pick the music and allow Oliver and me to conduct a beer tasting once a day. They stuck Black Lives Matter, Believe Women, and Progress flag decals on the front door and windows, and I remember Irene wearing a Black Trans Lives Matter shirt once or twice when covering a supervisor's shift. None of the college students or recent graduates who composed most of Avenue Brew's staff could say the bosses weren't on the right team. And yet...
I'm sorry—I was talking about Austin. He was maybe 30 and already had another job, a “real” job, some sort of remote gig lucrative enough for him to make rent on a studio in the picturesque Episcopal church down the street that had been converted into upscale apartments some years back. Austin wasn’t looking for extra cash. He wanted to socialize. To have something to do and people to talk to in the outside world. He wanted to make friends, and all of us could appreciate that—but it’s hard to be fond of a coworker who irredeemably sucks at his job. Austin never acted with any urgency, was inattentive to detail, and even after repeated interventions from Oliver and the supervisors, he continued to perform basic tasks in bafflingly inefficient ways. Having Austin on your shift meant carrying his slack, and everyone was fed up after a few months. Oliver sat him down, told him he was on thin ice, and gave him a list of the areas in which he needed to improve if he didn’t want to be let go.
When Austin gave Oliver the indignant “I don’t need this job” speech, it was different from those times Danny or I told a boss to go to hell and walked out. Austin truly didn’t need it. He basically said the job was beneath him, and so was Oliver.
It got deep under Oliver’s skin. He did need the job and had to take it seriously, even when it meant being the dipshit manager chewing out a man four or five years his senior. He earned $18 an hour (plus tips when he wasn’t doing admin work), had debts to pay off, and couldn't expect to get any help from his family.
The important thing, though, the part I distinctly remember, was that Oliver was looking at a video of a wading bird Austin had recorded. An egret, maybe. White feathers, long black legs, pointy black beak. Austin must have been standing on a ledge above a creek, because he had an overhead view of the bird as it stood in the water, slowly and deliberately stretching and retracting its neck, eyeing the wriggling little shadows below. As far as the fish could know, they were swimming around a pair of reeds growing out of the silt. The predator from which they extended was of a world beyond their understanding and out of their reach.
The video ended. Oliver moved on to the next item: a photograph of the bird from the same perspective, with a fish clamped in its beak. Water droplets flung from the victim's thrashing tail caught the sunlight. And I remember now, I clearly remember, the shapes of like twelve other fish stupidly milling about the bird's feet, unperturbed and unpanicked.
Danny peered at Oliver’s phone and observed a resemblance between the bird—its shape and bearing, and the composition of the photograph—and a POV porn video shot from behind and above, and he told us so. Elaborately. He made squawking noises.
“And mom says I’m a degenerate,” Oliver sighed. “Can you practice your interspecies pickup artist shit somewhere else?” Oliver flicked his wrist, shooing Danny off, and held his phone in front of his face to signal that he was done talking.
Danny sagged a little on his stool and turned away. I sometimes felt bad for him. For all his faults, he had the heart of a puppy dog. He really did think of us as his tribe. There was nobody else who’d only ever answer “yes” when you asked him to pick up a shift, and he did it completely out of loyalty.
He was turning 29 in a week. I wondered how many people would actually turn out to celebrate with him at the Black Taxi. Kyle probably would—but even he regarded Danny more as a source of vulgar entertainment than a friend.
Then it happened again. When I turned to speak to Oliver, there’d been a pair of pool cues leaning side-by-side against the wall a few stools down. Now they were gone.
This time it might have been my imagination. Somebody passing by could have casually snatched them up and kept walking.
But a moment later I seemed to notice a second TouchTunes box protruding from the wall directly behind me. I let it be.
Marina returned from the bathroom. Danny rose and offered her back her seat with an exaggerated bow. Before she got settled, I asked if she’d like to step outside with me. She withdrew her pack of Marlboro Menthols from her canvas bag, which she left sitting on the stool to deter Danny from sitting back down.
Marina never minded letting me bum cigarettes from time to time. I couldn’t buy them for myself anymore; it’s a habit I could never keep under control, and was only getting more expensive. Like everything else in the world. About once a month I reimbursed her by buying her a pack.
The air out on the sidewalk was as hot as the air inside Twenty, but easier to breathe. After lighting up, Marina leaned against the bricks and sighed.
“I wish Oliver would fire Danny already and get it over with.”
I nodded. Marina rarely talked about anything but work.
“He sneaks drinks and doesn't think anyone notices he's buzzed,” she went on. “He steals so much shit and isn’t even a little subtle about it. He’s going to get Oliver in trouble. And he’s a creep.”
“Yeah,” I said. These were her usual complaints about Danny, and they were all true. “At least he’s better than Austin.”
“That’s a low bar.”
Three dirt bikes and an ATV roared down the lonely street, charging through stop sign after stop sign, putting our talk on hold.
“Remind me. You’ve got one semester left, right?” I asked after the noise ebbed.
“Yep.”
Marina was a marketing major at Temple. She’d had an internship during the spring semester, and her boss told her to give her a call the very minute she graduated. Her parents in central Pennsylvania couldn’t pay her rent or tuition for her, so she was a full-time student and a full-time employee at Avenue Brew. Her emotional spectrum ranged from "tired" to "over it." She’d been waiting tables and working at coffee shops since she was seventeen, had no intention of continuing for even a day longer than she had to, and feared the escape hatch would slam shut if she dallied too long after prying it open.
She’d considered majoring in English, like Kyle. She went for marketing instead. I couldn’t blame her.
“Are you okay?” she asked. “You’ve been kind of off all day.”
“I’m terrible.”
“Why?”
I gave dodgy answers, but she asked precisely the right follow-up questions to get me going about what happened with Heather the night before.
It was the new job. Before the pandemic, Heather worked as a server at a Center City bar and grill. (That's where I met her; we were coworkers for about a year, and then I left to work Café Chakra because it was quieter and closer to where I lived.) When the place closed its doors and laid everyone off during the lockdown, she got a stopgap job at the Acme on Passyunk, and hated it. Then in March, she found a bar-and-lounge gig in a ritzy hotel on Broad Street. Very corporate. Excellent pay, great benefits. Definitely a step up. But her new employers made Irene and Jeremy look like Bob and Linda Belcher by comparison. It was the kind of place where someone had recently gotten herself fired for leaving work to rush to the hospital after getting the news that her grandmother was about to be taken off life support, and not finding someone to come in and cover the last two hours of her shift.
Heather seldom worked fewer than fifty-five hours a week, and her schedule was even more erratic than mine. At least once a week she left the hotel at 1:00 or 2:00 AM and returned at 9:00 the next morning. Neither of us could remember the last time she’d had two consecutive days off, and it had been over a month since one of mine overlapped with one of hers. She’d spent it drinking alone at home. All she wanted was some privacy.
I’d biked to South Philly to meet her when she got home at 1:30. The argument that killed our relationship for good began around 2:30, when I complained that we never had sex anymore. Heather accused me of only caring about that, when she was so exhausted and stressed that her hair was falling out in the shower. Quit the job? She couldn’t quit. The money was too good. She had student loans, medical bills, and credit card debt, and for the first time in her life she could imagine paying it all off before hitting menopause.
So, yeah, I was cranky about our sex life being dead in the water. Say whatever you like. But at that point, what were we to each other? We did nothing together anymore but complain about work before one or both of us fell asleep. That isn’t a relationship.
She said my hair always smelled like sandwiches, even after bathing, and she was done pretending it didn’t turn her off. I told her she was one to talk—she always reeked of liquor. As things escalated, we stopped caring if her roommates heard us. “You want to be a father?” she shouted around 4:00 AM. “Making what you make? That poor fucking kid.”
We fought until sunrise, and I left her apartment with the understanding that I wouldn’t be coming back, wouldn’t be calling her ever again. I biked home and sat on the steps facing the cement panel that was my house’s backyard. After my phone died and I couldn’t anaesthetize myself with dumb YouTube videos or make myself feel crazy staring at the download button for the Tinder app, I watched the sparrows hopping on and off the utility lines for a while.
At 11:40 I went inside. One of my roommates was already in the shower, so the best I could do was put on a clean Avenue Brew T-shirt before walking to the shop and clocking in at noon to help deal with the lunch rush.
“That’s a lot,” Marina finally said. “Sorry.”
I don’t know what I was expecting her to say. She was sixteen years my junior, after all, and just a coworker. She didn’t need to hear any of this, and I definitely didn't need to be telling her. But who else was there to tell?
She’d already finished her cigarette. I still had a few puffs left. She went inside.
I decided to call it a night.
The second TouchTunes box was gone—naturally. Danny had taken my stool, and regarded my approach with a puckish you snooze you lose grin. I wasn’t going to say anything. I’d just pay my bill, give everyone a nod goodnight, and walk the five blocks back home.
And then Danny disappeared.
One second, he was there. The next—gone.
Danny didn’t just instantaneously vanish. Even when something happens in the blink of an eye, you can still put together something of a sequence. I saw him—I seemed to see him—falling into himself, collapsing to a point, and then to nothing.
You know how sometimes a sound is altogether inaudible unless you’re looking at the source—like when you don’t realize somebody’s whispering at you, and can then hear and understand them after they get your attention? I think that was the case here. I wouldn't have known to listen if I hadn't seen it happen. What I heard lingered for two, maybe three seconds, and wasn't any louder than a fly buzzing inside a lampshade. A tiny and impossibly distant scream, pitchshifted like a receding ambulance siren into a basso drone...
I don’t know. I don’t know for sure. I’m certain I remember a flash of red, and I have the idea of Danny’s trunk expanding, opening up as it imploded. A crimson flower, flecked white, with spooling pink stalks—and Danny’s wide-eyed face above it, drawn twisting and shrinking into its petals.
For an instant, Twenty’s interior shimmered. Not shimmered, exactly—glitched would be a better word. If you’re old enough to remember the fragmented graphics that sometimes flashed onscreen when you turned on the Nintendo without blowing on the cartridge, you’ll have an idea of what I mean. It happened much too fast, and there was too much of it to absorb. The one clear impression I could parse was the mirage of a cash register flickering upside-down above the pool table.
Not a cash register. The shape was familiar, but the texture was wrong. I think it was ribbed, sort of like a maggot. I think it glistened. Like—camo doesn’t work anymore when the wearer stops crouching behind a bush and breaks into a run. Do you get what I’m saying?
Nobody else seemed to notice. The pool balls clacked. A New Order track was playing on the TouchTunes box. A nearby argument about about Nick Sirianni continued unabated.
Finally, there was a downward rush of air—and this at least elicited a reaction from the bartender, who slapped my bill to keep it from sailing off the counter.
“Danny,” I said.
“Danny?” Kyle asked me quietly. His face had gone pale.
“Danny?” Oliver repeated in a faraway voice.
After a pause, Kyle blinked a few times. “You heard from him?”
“God forbid,” said Marina. “When he quit I was like, great, I can keep working here after all.”
“Oh, come on—”
“Kyle. Did I ever show you those texts he sent me once at three in the morning?” The color had returned to Oliver’s face.
“No, what did he say?”
Oliver tapped at his phone and turned the screen toward Kyle.
“Oh. Oh, jeez.”
“Right? Like—if you want to ask me something, ask me. You know? Don’t be weirdly accusatory about it…”
I pulled a wad of fives and ones from my pocket, threw it all onto the counter, and beelined for the exit without consideration for the people I squeezed through and shoved past on the way.
I heard Marina saying “let him go.”
I went a second consecutive night without sleep. Fortunately I wasn’t scheduled to come in the next day.
The schedule. It’s funny. Oliver was generally great at his job, and even when he wasn’t, I cut him a lot of slack because I knew Irene and Jeremy never gave him a moment’s peace. But I could never forgive him those times he waited until the weekend to make up and distribute the schedule. This was one of those weeks he didn’t get around to it until Saturday afternoon. When I found it in my inbox, Danny’s name wasn’t anywhere on it.
As far as I know, nobody who hadn’t been at Twenty that night asked what happened to him. We were a bit overstaffed as it was, and everyone probably assumed Danny was slated for the chopping block. The part-timers were, for the most part, happy to get a few additional hours.
Oliver abruptly quit around Labor Day after a final acrimonious clash with the owners. I never found out the details, and I never saw him again. Jeremy and Irene took turns minding the store while a replacement manager was sought. None of the supervisors would be pressured into taking the job; they knew from Oliver what they could expect.
About three weeks after Oliver left, I came in for my purchasing shift and found Jeremy waiting for me in the back room. I knew it was serious when he didn’t greet me with the awkward fist-bump he ordinarily required of his male employees.
“You’ve seen the numbers,” he said. Business for the summer had fallen short of expectations, it was true, and he and Irene had decided to rein in payroll expenses. My purchaser position was being eliminated. Its responsibilities would be redistributed among the supervisors and the new manager, when one was found. In the meantime, I'd be going back to the regular $11 an hour (plus tips of course) associate position full-time.
Jeremy assured me I'd be first in the running for supervisor the next time there was an opening.
I told him it was fine, I was done, and if he’d expected the courtesy of two weeks’ notice, he shouldn’t have blindsided me like that.
“Well, that’s your choice,” he answered, trying not to look pleased. His payroll problem was solving itself.
I racked up credit card debt for a few months. Applied for entry-level museum jobs that might appreciate my art history degree. Aimed for some purchasing and administrative assistant gigs, and just for the hell of it, turned in a resume for a facilitator position at an after-school art program. Got a few interviews. All of them eventually told me they’d decided to go in a different direction. I finally got hired to bartend at Hops from Underground, a microbrewery on Fairmount.
I’m still there. The money’s okay, but it fluctuates. Hours are reasonable. I’m on their high-deductible health plan. There’s a coworker I’ve been dating. Sort of dating. You know how it goes. In this line of work you get so used to people coming and going that you learn not to get too attached. I walk past Avenue Brew a few times a week, but stopped peering in through the window when I didn't recognize the people behind the counter anymore.
submitted by obeliskposture to stupidpol [link] [comments]
It's relevant to the sub insofar as it's about urban alienation and the working conditions at a small business run by IN THIS HOUSE WE BELIEVE people. (I tried to pitch it as a story of the great resignation with a momentary flicker of cosmic horror.) It's based on a similar job I took on after getting laid off during the lockdown, and the circumstances of the main character's breakup are faintly similar to one I went through several years back (her job sucked the life out of her).
Without further ado:
* * *
It was getting close to midnight, and the temperature outside was still above 80 degrees. We’d locked up the shop at 10:15 and walked over to Twenty, the dive bar on Poplar Street, where a single wall-mounted air conditioner and four wobbly ceiling fans weren’t putting up much resistance against the July heat baking the place from the outside and the dense mass of bodies giving it a stifling fever from within.
Just now I came close to saying it was a Wednesday night, because that was usually when the cyclists descended upon Avenue Brew, the gritty-but-bougie craft beer and sandwich shop I was working at back then. Every Wednesday between March and November, about fifteen to twenty-five Gen Xers dressed in skintight polyester, all packages and camel toes and fanny packs, locked up their thousand-dollar bikes on the sidewalk and lined up for IPAs and paninis. They reliably arrived around 8:00, an hour before we closed, making it impossible to get started on the closing checklist and leave on time at 10:00. The worst of them were demanding and rude, and even the best got raucous and stubborn after a couple drinks. There were nights when bringing in the sidewalk tables couldn’t be done without arguing with them. Most were sub-par tippers, to boot.
After Wednesday came and went that week without so much as a single 40-something in Ray Bans and padded shorts stopping in to double-fist two cans of Jai Alai, we dared to hope the cyclists had chosen another spot to be their finish line from there on out. But no—they’d only postponed their weekly ride, and swarmed us on Friday night instead.
I was the last person to find out; I was clocked in as purchaser that evening. The position was something like a promotion I'd received a year earlier: for twenty hours a week, I got to retreat from the public and sit in the back room with the store laptop, reviewing sales and inventory, answering emails from brewery reps, and ordering beer, beverages, and assorted paper goods. When I put in hours as purchaser, my wage went up from $11 to $15 an hour, but I was removed from the tip pool. On most days, tips amounted to an extra two or three dollars an hour, so I usually came out ahead.
This was back in 2021. I don't know what Avenue Brew pays these days.
Anyway, at about 8:15, I stepped out to say goodbye to everyone and found the shop in chaos. Friday nights were generally pretty active, the cyclists' arrival had turned the place into a mob scene. The line extended to the front door. The phone was ringing. The Grubhub tablet dinged like an alarm clock without a snooze button. Danny was on the sandwich line and on the verge of losing his temper. Oliver was working up a sweat running food, bussing tables, and replenishing ingredients from the walk-in. The unflappable Marina was on register, and even she seemed like she was about to snap at somebody.
What else could I do? I stayed until closing to answer the phone, process Grubhub orders, hop on and off the second register, and help Danny with sandwich prep. After the tills were counted out, I stayed another hour to take care of the dishes, since nobody had a chance to do a first load. Oliver was grateful, even though he grumbled about having to make some calls and rearrange Sunday's schedule so I could come in a couple hours late. Irene and Jeremy, Avenue Brew's owners, would kick his ass if he let me go into overtime.
Danny suggested that we deserved a few drinks ourselves after managing to get through the shift without killing anyone. Not even Marina could find a reason to disagree with him.
The neighborhood had undergone enough gentrification to support an upscale brunch spot, an ice cream parlor, a gourmet burger restaurant, a coffee and bahn mi shop, and Avenue Brew (to name a few examples), but not yet quite enough that the people who staffed them couldn’t afford to live within a ten-minute walk from the main avenue where all these hep eateries stood between 24-hour corner stores with slot machines in back, late-night Chinese and Mexico-Italian takeout joints with bulletproof glass at the counters, and long-shuttered delis and shoe stores. Twenty on Poplar was the watering hole set aside for people like us. It was dim, a bit dilapidated, and inexpensive, and usually avoided by denizens of the condos popping up on the vacant lots and replacing clusters of abandoned row houses.
When we arrived, Kyle waved us over. He didn’t work at Avenue Brew anymore, but still kept up with a few of us. He was at Twenty at least four nights out of the week.
So there we all were. I sat with a brooding stranger freestyling to himself in a low mumble on the stool to my left and Oliver on my right, who tapped at his phone and nursed a bottle of Twisted Tea. To Oliver’s right sat Marina, staring at nothing in particular and trying to ignore Danny, who stood behind her, closer than she would have liked, listening to Kyle explain the crucial differences between the Invincible comic book and the Invincible web series.
I recall being startled back to something like wakefulness when it seemed to me that the ceiling had sprouted a new fan. I blinked my eyes, and it wasn’t there anymore. It reminded me of an incident from when I was still living with my folks in South Jersey and still had a car, and was driving home from a friend’s house party up in Bergen County. It was 6:30 AM, I hadn’t slept all night, and needed to get home so I could get at least little shuteye before heading to Whole Foods for my 11:00 AM shift. I imagined I passed beneath the shadows of overpasses I knew weren’t there, and realized I was dreaming at the wheel.
I was pretty thoroughly zombified at that point. Heather and I had broken up for good the night before, and I hadn't gotten even a minute of sleep. Calling out at Avenue Brew was tough. Unless you found someone willing to cover your shift on like six hours' notice, you were liable to get a writeup, a demotion, or your hours cut if you couldn't produce a doctor's note. So I loaded up on caffeine pills and Five-Hour Energy bottles at the corner store, and powered through as best I could.
I finished the last thimbleful of Blue Moon in my glass. Oliver wiped the sweat from the back of his neck with a napkin and covered his mouth to stifle a laugh at the KiwiFarms thread he was scrolling through. Pool balls clacked; somebody swore and somebody laughed. The TouchTunes box was playing Bob Dylan’s “Rain Day Woman #12 & 35,” and enough bleary 40-something men around the bar were bobbing their heads and mouthing the words to make it impossible to determine which one of them paid two bucks to hear it. A guy by the cigarette machine who looked like a caricature of Art Carney in flannel and an old Pixies T-shirt was accosting a woman who must have been a toddler when he hit drinking age, and she momentarily made eye contact with me as she scanned the area for a way out. Danny was shouting over the bartender’s head, carrying on a conversation with the Hot Guy from Pizza Stan’s, who was sitting on the horseshoe’s opposite arm.
I never got his name, but when Oliver first referred to him as the Hot Guy from Pizza Stan’s, I knew exactly who he meant. Philly scene kid par excellence. Mid-20s, washed-out black denim, dyed black hair, thick bangs, and dark, gentle eyes. He was only truly alluring when he was on the job, because he seldom smiled then—and when he smiled, he broke the spell by exposing his teeth, stained a gnarly shade of mahogany from too much smoking and not enough brushing.
“How’s Best? Marcus still a joker?” Danny asked him.
“Yeah, you know Marcus. You know how he is.”
So the Hot Guy had been working at Best Burger (directly across the street from Avenue Brew) ever since Pizza Stan’s owners mismanaged the place unto insolvency. (Afterwards it was renovated and reopened as a vegan bakery—which incidentally closed down about a month ago.) Danny used to work at Best Burger, but that ended after he got into a shouting match with the owner. I happened to overhear it while I was dragging in the tables and collecting the chairs from the sidewalk the night it happened. It wasn’t any of my business, and I tried not to pay attention, but they were really tearing into each other. A month later, Oliver welcomed Danny aboard at Avenue Brew. I hadn’t known he’d been interviewed, and by then it was too late to mention the incident. But I’d have been a hypocrite to call it a red flag after the way I resigned from my position as Café Chakra's assistant manager two years earlier—not that we need to go dredging that up right now. Let's say there was some bad blood and leave it at that.
Anyway, I was thinking about giving in and buying a pack of cigarettes from the machine—and then remembered that Twenty didn’t have a cigarette machine. I looked again. The Art Carney-lookalike was still there, fingering his phone with a frown, but the girl was gone—and so was the cigarette machine.
I had only a moment to puzzle over this before Danny clapped me on the shoulder and thrust a shot glass in front of me.
“Starfish!” he said. (Danny called me Starfish. Everybody else called me Pat.) “You look like you need some juice.”
He distributed shots to everyone else. Marina declined hers, but changed her mind when Kyle offered to take it instead.
She and Kyle had stopped sleeping together after Kyle left Avenue Brew to work at the Victory taproom on the Parkway, but Marina was still concerned about his bad habits, which Danny delighted in encouraging.
We all leaned in to clink our glasses. Before I could find an appropriate moment to ask Marina if I could bum a cigarette, she got up to visit the bathroom. Danny took her seat and bowed his head for a conspiratorial word with Kyle.
I watched from the corner of my eye and tried to listen in. Like Marina, I was a little worried about Kyle. He got hired at Avenue Brew around the same time I did, just before the pandemic temporarily turned us into a takeout joint. He was a senior at Drexel then, an English major, and sometimes talked about wanting to either find work in publishing or carve out a career as a freelance writer after graduating. But first he intended to spend a year getting some life in before submitting himself to the forever grind.
He read a lot of Charles Bukowski and Hunter Thompson. He relished the gritty and sordid, and had already been good at sniffing it out around the neighborhood and in West Philly before Danny introduced him to cocaine, casinos, strip clubs, and a rogue’s gallery of shady but fascinating people. (None were really Danny’s friends; just fellow passengers who intersected with the part of his life where he sometimes went to Parx, sometimes came out ahead, sometimes spent his winnings on coke, and sometimes did bumps at titty bars.) Kyle recounted these adventures with a boyish enthusiasm for the naked reality of sleaze, like a middle schooler telling his locker room buddies about catching his older brother in flagrante and seeing so-and-so body parts doing such-and-such things.
Marina hated it. She never said as much to me, but she was afraid that the template Kyle set for his life during his “year off” was in danger of becoming locked in. The anniversary of his graduation had already passed, and now here he was trying to convince Danny to contribute a couple hundred dollars toward a sheet of acid his guy had for sale. He wasn't doing much writing lately.
I was the oldest employee at Avenue Brew (as I write this I’m 37, but fortunately I don’t look it), and when Kyle still worked with us I felt like it was my prerogative to give him some advice. The longer he waited to make inroads, I once told him, the more likely he’d be seen as damaged goods by the publishing world. He needed to jam his foot in the door while he was still young.
I could tell the conversation bored him, and didn’t bring up the subject again.
The bartender took my glass and curtly asked if I’d like another drink.
“No thanks, not yet,” I answered.
She slid me my bill.
I missed the old bartender, the one she’d replaced. I forget her name, but she was ingenuous and energetic and sweet. Pretty much everyone had some sort of crush on her. Sometimes she came into Avenue Brew for lunch, and tipped us as well as we tipped her. Maybe three months before that night—Danny witnessed it—she suddenly started crying and rushed out the door. Everyone at the bar mutely looked to each other for an explanation. (Fortunately for Twenty, the kitchen manager hadn’t left yet, and picked up the rest of her shift.)
She never came back. None of us had seen her since. But drafts still had to be poured and bottlecaps pulled off, and now here was another white woman in her mid-twenties wearing a black tank top, a pushup bra, and a scrunchie, same as before. Twenty’s regulars grew accustomed to not expecting to see the person she’d replaced, and life went on.
“How’re you doing?” I asked Oliver, just to say something to somebody, and to keep my thoughts from wandering back to Heather.
“Just kind of existing right now,” he answered. His phone lay face-up on the counter. He was swiping through Instagram, and I recognized the avatar of the user whose album he hate-browsed.
“And how’s Austin been?” I asked.
“Oh, you know. Not even three weeks after getting over the jetlag from his trip back from the Cascades, he’s off touring Ireland.” He shook his head. “Living his best life.”
He’d hired Austin on a part-time basis in September. We needed a new associate when Emma was promoted to replace a supervisor who'd quit without even giving his two weeks. There was a whole thing. I'm having a hard time recalling the guy's name, but I liked him well enough. He was a good worker and he seemed like a bright kid, but he was—well, he was young. Naïve. One day he found Jeremy sitting in the back room with his laptop, and took advantage of the open-door policy to ask why the store manager and supervisors didn’t get health benefits or paid time off. Jeremy told him it "was being worked on," and that he couldn’t discuss it any further at that time. I understand the kid got argumentative, though I never knew precisely what was said.
Irene started visiting the shop a lot more often after that, almost always arriving when the kid was working. No matter what he was doing, she’d find a reason to intervene, to micromanage and harangue him, and effectively make his job impossible. A coincidence, surely.
It’s something I still think about. By any metric, Jeremy and Irene have done very well for themselves. They’re both a little over 40 years old. I remember hearing they met at law school. In addition to Avenue Brew, they own a bistro in Francisville and an ice cream parlor in Point Breeze. They have a house on the Blue Line, send their son to a Montessori school, and pull up to their businesses in a white Volkswagen ID.4. But whenever the subject of benefits, wages, or even free shift meals came up, they pled poverty. It simply couldn’t be done. But they liked to remind us about all they did to make Avenue Brew a fun place to work, like let the staff pick the music and allow Oliver and me to conduct a beer tasting once a day. They stuck Black Lives Matter, Believe Women, and Progress flag decals on the front door and windows, and I remember Irene wearing a Black Trans Lives Matter shirt once or twice when covering a supervisor's shift. None of the college students or recent graduates who composed most of Avenue Brew's staff could say the bosses weren't on the right team. And yet...
I'm sorry—I was talking about Austin. He was maybe 30 and already had another job, a “real” job, some sort of remote gig lucrative enough for him to make rent on a studio in the picturesque Episcopal church down the street that had been converted into upscale apartments some years back. Austin wasn’t looking for extra cash. He wanted to socialize. To have something to do and people to talk to in the outside world. He wanted to make friends, and all of us could appreciate that—but it’s hard to be fond of a coworker who irredeemably sucks at his job. Austin never acted with any urgency, was inattentive to detail, and even after repeated interventions from Oliver and the supervisors, he continued to perform basic tasks in bafflingly inefficient ways. Having Austin on your shift meant carrying his slack, and everyone was fed up after a few months. Oliver sat him down, told him he was on thin ice, and gave him a list of the areas in which he needed to improve if he didn’t want to be let go.
When Austin gave Oliver the indignant “I don’t need this job” speech, it was different from those times Danny or I told a boss to go to hell and walked out. Austin truly didn’t need it. He basically said the job was beneath him, and so was Oliver.
It got deep under Oliver’s skin. He did need the job and had to take it seriously, even when it meant being the dipshit manager chewing out a man four or five years his senior. He earned $18 an hour (plus tips when he wasn’t doing admin work), had debts to pay off, and couldn't expect to get any help from his family.
The important thing, though, the part I distinctly remember, was that Oliver was looking at a video of a wading bird Austin had recorded. An egret, maybe. White feathers, long black legs, pointy black beak. Austin must have been standing on a ledge above a creek, because he had an overhead view of the bird as it stood in the water, slowly and deliberately stretching and retracting its neck, eyeing the wriggling little shadows below. As far as the fish could know, they were swimming around a pair of reeds growing out of the silt. The predator from which they extended was of a world beyond their understanding and out of their reach.
The video ended. Oliver moved on to the next item: a photograph of the bird from the same perspective, with a fish clamped in its beak. Water droplets flung from the victim's thrashing tail caught the sunlight. And I remember now, I clearly remember, the shapes of like twelve other fish stupidly milling about the bird's feet, unperturbed and unpanicked.
Danny peered at Oliver’s phone and observed a resemblance between the bird—its shape and bearing, and the composition of the photograph—and a POV porn video shot from behind and above, and he told us so. Elaborately. He made squawking noises.
“And mom says I’m a degenerate,” Oliver sighed. “Can you practice your interspecies pickup artist shit somewhere else?” Oliver flicked his wrist, shooing Danny off, and held his phone in front of his face to signal that he was done talking.
Danny sagged a little on his stool and turned away. I sometimes felt bad for him. For all his faults, he had the heart of a puppy dog. He really did think of us as his tribe. There was nobody else who’d only ever answer “yes” when you asked him to pick up a shift, and he did it completely out of loyalty.
He was turning 29 in a week. I wondered how many people would actually turn out to celebrate with him at the Black Taxi. Kyle probably would—but even he regarded Danny more as a source of vulgar entertainment than a friend.
Then it happened again. When I turned to speak to Oliver, there’d been a pair of pool cues leaning side-by-side against the wall a few stools down. Now they were gone.
This time it might have been my imagination. Somebody passing by could have casually snatched them up and kept walking.
But a moment later I seemed to notice a second TouchTunes box protruding from the wall directly behind me. I let it be.
Marina returned from the bathroom. Danny rose and offered her back her seat with an exaggerated bow. Before she got settled, I asked if she’d like to step outside with me. She withdrew her pack of Marlboro Menthols from her canvas bag, which she left sitting on the stool to deter Danny from sitting back down.
Marina never minded letting me bum cigarettes from time to time. I couldn’t buy them for myself anymore; it’s a habit I could never keep under control, and was only getting more expensive. Like everything else in the world. About once a month I reimbursed her by buying her a pack.
The air out on the sidewalk was as hot as the air inside Twenty, but easier to breathe. After lighting up, Marina leaned against the bricks and sighed.
“I wish Oliver would fire Danny already and get it over with.”
I nodded. Marina rarely talked about anything but work.
“He sneaks drinks and doesn't think anyone notices he's buzzed,” she went on. “He steals so much shit and isn’t even a little subtle about it. He’s going to get Oliver in trouble. And he’s a creep.”
“Yeah,” I said. These were her usual complaints about Danny, and they were all true. “At least he’s better than Austin.”
“That’s a low bar.”
Three dirt bikes and an ATV roared down the lonely street, charging through stop sign after stop sign, putting our talk on hold.
“Remind me. You’ve got one semester left, right?” I asked after the noise ebbed.
“Yep.”
Marina was a marketing major at Temple. She’d had an internship during the spring semester, and her boss told her to give her a call the very minute she graduated. Her parents in central Pennsylvania couldn’t pay her rent or tuition for her, so she was a full-time student and a full-time employee at Avenue Brew. Her emotional spectrum ranged from "tired" to "over it." She’d been waiting tables and working at coffee shops since she was seventeen, had no intention of continuing for even a day longer than she had to, and feared the escape hatch would slam shut if she dallied too long after prying it open.
She’d considered majoring in English, like Kyle. She went for marketing instead. I couldn’t blame her.
“Are you okay?” she asked. “You’ve been kind of off all day.”
“I’m terrible.”
“Why?”
I gave dodgy answers, but she asked precisely the right follow-up questions to get me going about what happened with Heather the night before.
It was the new job. Before the pandemic, Heather worked as a server at a Center City bar and grill. (That's where I met her; we were coworkers for about a year, and then I left to work Café Chakra because it was quieter and closer to where I lived.) When the place closed its doors and laid everyone off during the lockdown, she got a stopgap job at the Acme on Passyunk, and hated it. Then in March, she found a bar-and-lounge gig in a ritzy hotel on Broad Street. Very corporate. Excellent pay, great benefits. Definitely a step up. But her new employers made Irene and Jeremy look like Bob and Linda Belcher by comparison. It was the kind of place where someone had recently gotten herself fired for leaving work to rush to the hospital after getting the news that her grandmother was about to be taken off life support, and not finding someone to come in and cover the last two hours of her shift.
Heather seldom worked fewer than fifty-five hours a week, and her schedule was even more erratic than mine. At least once a week she left the hotel at 1:00 or 2:00 AM and returned at 9:00 the next morning. Neither of us could remember the last time she’d had two consecutive days off, and it had been over a month since one of mine overlapped with one of hers. She’d spent it drinking alone at home. All she wanted was some privacy.
I’d biked to South Philly to meet her when she got home at 1:30. The argument that killed our relationship for good began around 2:30, when I complained that we never had sex anymore. Heather accused me of only caring about that, when she was so exhausted and stressed that her hair was falling out in the shower. Quit the job? She couldn’t quit. The money was too good. She had student loans, medical bills, and credit card debt, and for the first time in her life she could imagine paying it all off before hitting menopause.
So, yeah, I was cranky about our sex life being dead in the water. Say whatever you like. But at that point, what were we to each other? We did nothing together anymore but complain about work before one or both of us fell asleep. That isn’t a relationship.
She said my hair always smelled like sandwiches, even after bathing, and she was done pretending it didn’t turn her off. I told her she was one to talk—she always reeked of liquor. As things escalated, we stopped caring if her roommates heard us. “You want to be a father?” she shouted around 4:00 AM. “Making what you make? That poor fucking kid.”
We fought until sunrise, and I left her apartment with the understanding that I wouldn’t be coming back, wouldn’t be calling her ever again. I biked home and sat on the steps facing the cement panel that was my house’s backyard. After my phone died and I couldn’t anaesthetize myself with dumb YouTube videos or make myself feel crazy staring at the download button for the Tinder app, I watched the sparrows hopping on and off the utility lines for a while.
At 11:40 I went inside. One of my roommates was already in the shower, so the best I could do was put on a clean Avenue Brew T-shirt before walking to the shop and clocking in at noon to help deal with the lunch rush.
“That’s a lot,” Marina finally said. “Sorry.”
I don’t know what I was expecting her to say. She was sixteen years my junior, after all, and just a coworker. She didn’t need to hear any of this, and I definitely didn't need to be telling her. But who else was there to tell?
She’d already finished her cigarette. I still had a few puffs left. She went inside.
I decided to call it a night.
The second TouchTunes box was gone—naturally. Danny had taken my stool, and regarded my approach with a puckish you snooze you lose grin. I wasn’t going to say anything. I’d just pay my bill, give everyone a nod goodnight, and walk the five blocks back home.
And then Danny disappeared.
One second, he was there. The next—gone.
Danny didn’t just instantaneously vanish. Even when something happens in the blink of an eye, you can still put together something of a sequence. I saw him—I seemed to see him—falling into himself, collapsing to a point, and then to nothing.
You know how sometimes a sound is altogether inaudible unless you’re looking at the source—like when you don’t realize somebody’s whispering at you, and can then hear and understand them after they get your attention? I think that was the case here. I wouldn't have known to listen if I hadn't seen it happen. What I heard lingered for two, maybe three seconds, and wasn't any louder than a fly buzzing inside a lampshade. A tiny and impossibly distant scream, pitchshifted like a receding ambulance siren into a basso drone...
I don’t know. I don’t know for sure. I’m certain I remember a flash of red, and I have the idea of Danny’s trunk expanding, opening up as it imploded. A crimson flower, flecked white, with spooling pink stalks—and Danny’s wide-eyed face above it, drawn twisting and shrinking into its petals.
For an instant, Twenty’s interior shimmered. Not shimmered, exactly—glitched would be a better word. If you’re old enough to remember the fragmented graphics that sometimes flashed onscreen when you turned on the Nintendo without blowing on the cartridge, you’ll have an idea of what I mean. It happened much too fast, and there was too much of it to absorb. The one clear impression I could parse was the mirage of a cash register flickering upside-down above the pool table.
Not a cash register. The shape was familiar, but the texture was wrong. I think it was ribbed, sort of like a maggot. I think it glistened. Like—camo doesn’t work anymore when the wearer stops crouching behind a bush and breaks into a run. Do you get what I’m saying?
Nobody else seemed to notice. The pool balls clacked. A New Order track was playing on the TouchTunes box. A nearby argument about about Nick Sirianni continued unabated.
Finally, there was a downward rush of air—and this at least elicited a reaction from the bartender, who slapped my bill to keep it from sailing off the counter.
“Danny,” I said.
“Danny?” Kyle asked me quietly. His face had gone pale.
“Danny?” Oliver repeated in a faraway voice.
After a pause, Kyle blinked a few times. “You heard from him?”
“God forbid,” said Marina. “When he quit I was like, great, I can keep working here after all.”
“Oh, come on—”
“Kyle. Did I ever show you those texts he sent me once at three in the morning?” The color had returned to Oliver’s face.
“No, what did he say?”
Oliver tapped at his phone and turned the screen toward Kyle.
“Oh. Oh, jeez.”
“Right? Like—if you want to ask me something, ask me. You know? Don’t be weirdly accusatory about it…”
I pulled a wad of fives and ones from my pocket, threw it all onto the counter, and beelined for the exit without consideration for the people I squeezed through and shoved past on the way.
I heard Marina saying “let him go.”
I went a second consecutive night without sleep. Fortunately I wasn’t scheduled to come in the next day.
The schedule. It’s funny. Oliver was generally great at his job, and even when he wasn’t, I cut him a lot of slack because I knew Irene and Jeremy never gave him a moment’s peace. But I could never forgive him those times he waited until the weekend to make up and distribute the schedule. This was one of those weeks he didn’t get around to it until Saturday afternoon. When I found it in my inbox, Danny’s name wasn’t anywhere on it.
As far as I know, nobody who hadn’t been at Twenty that night asked what happened to him. We were a bit overstaffed as it was, and everyone probably assumed Danny was slated for the chopping block. The part-timers were, for the most part, happy to get a few additional hours.
Oliver abruptly quit around Labor Day after a final acrimonious clash with the owners. I never found out the details, and I never saw him again. Jeremy and Irene took turns minding the store while a replacement manager was sought. None of the supervisors would be pressured into taking the job; they knew from Oliver what they could expect.
About three weeks after Oliver left, I came in for my purchasing shift and found Jeremy waiting for me in the back room. I knew it was serious when he didn’t greet me with the awkward fist-bump he ordinarily required of his male employees.
“You’ve seen the numbers,” he said. Business for the summer had fallen short of expectations, it was true, and he and Irene had decided to rein in payroll expenses. My purchaser position was being eliminated. Its responsibilities would be redistributed among the supervisors and the new manager, when one was found. In the meantime, I'd be going back to the regular $11 an hour (plus tips of course) associate position full-time.
Jeremy assured me I'd be first in the running for supervisor the next time there was an opening.
I told him it was fine, I was done, and if he’d expected the courtesy of two weeks’ notice, he shouldn’t have blindsided me like that.
“Well, that’s your choice,” he answered, trying not to look pleased. His payroll problem was solving itself.
I racked up credit card debt for a few months. Applied for entry-level museum jobs that might appreciate my art history degree. Aimed for some purchasing and administrative assistant gigs, and just for the hell of it, turned in a resume for a facilitator position at an after-school art program. Got a few interviews. All of them eventually told me they’d decided to go in a different direction. I finally got hired to bartend at Hops from Underground, a microbrewery on Fairmount.
I’m still there. The money’s okay, but it fluctuates. Hours are reasonable. I’m on their high-deductible health plan. There’s a coworker I’ve been dating. Sort of dating. You know how it goes. In this line of work you get so used to people coming and going that you learn not to get too attached. I walk past Avenue Brew a few times a week, but stopped peering in through the window when I didn't recognize the people behind the counter anymore.
2023.06.03 15:36 Eager_Question Love Languages (12)
Memory transcription subject: Andes Savulescu-Ruiz, Human Director at the Venlil Rehabilitation and Reintegration Facility. Universal translator tech.
Date [standardized human time]: Dec 3 2136
I wandered up to the boys after Lihla got a bit bored of head scritches. Parents were still wandering around, but the three of them seemed pretty comfortable engaging in parallel play off in the back of the play room.
"Hello there," I said. I didn't have to be too mindful to avoid looming over them. They seemed largely unaffected by my size, and were themselves taller than some of the venlil nurses already. I wondered idly what the Arxur cut-offs for ages were. If we'd have to separate them from the girls.
"Your savageness," one said, bowing. "You honour us with your presence."
The other two bowed as well. The girls usually just scurried away, except for Lihla's insistence on "sitting with me". How differently had the boys been treated?
"That's um, that's not necessary," I said, gesticulating vaguely, "how are you boys doing?"
They stood up straight.
"I have been using the board to make squiggling lines," one said, pointing at the drawing board. "It is relaxing."
"I have been putting similar shapes together," said the next. He pointed at a table where he had sorted different blocks. One of the smaller girls looked tempted by his collection, and the fact that his attention was currently primarily on me. Just like Lihla, she moved in slow, incremental steps, ready to run away should her approach turn sour. I managed not to laugh, and kept my attention on the boys.
"I have been assembling the sticky triangles," said a third, and showed me a pretty good-looking geodesic dome he must have gotten just by building outward with the triangle magnets in a spiral pattern.
"Ah. Very nice. I was told you went to the doctor recently," I added.
"Yes, my teeth are very good and I am strong!"
"They tested my pain resistance with a big needle, but I did not scream," said the second one, clearly bragging.
"My appointment is later," said the third. I was a little impressed by how orderly they were. Like each of them knew their number in the order of who got to talk when.
"Well, that's good to know. If you find anything uncomfortable, please tell me so we can make it better for you," I said. They tilted their heads in confusion. "I'm Director Andes. You can ask to be brought to my office and any aide or nurse should be able to guide you there."
"I'm 857–" one started, and was quickly elbowed by the one next to him. He hissed in pain, then looked back at me and shook himself. "I'm Tito."
"I'm Julio."
"I'm Marco."
"Well, it's very nice to meet you boys," I said, smiling behind my visor. It was very exciting to hear them use the names they were given at the hospital. Aside from Lihla, none of the girls seemed very interested in getting names. A few of the nurses and aides had suggested some to them, but none had really stuck.
"It's nice to meet you, Savageness," Marcus said. To my and apparently his brothers' surprise, he jutted out a paw in front of him. I chuckled and shook it. The other two emulated Marcus, and I shook their paws as well. While I did that, the girl that had been eyeing Julio's collection stole a handful of blocks and scurried off to hide.
"Well, boys, I should be getting back to work now, but like I said, if you need help in any way, just ask for me."
They all nodded quickly. I gave Larzo a wave and headed back to my office. Once there, I updated Lihla’s file, made an appointment with Karim to discuss our situation, and finished the third batch of applications from prospective parents. I wasn't going to let him get his paws on it, especially given that they were in the lower income deciles. Venlil adoption incentives seemed to be meaningfully stronger than those of, say, Canada. In Canada, adoption often meant adoptive parents faced a wide variety of hurdles, but in Venlil Prime there were meaningful financial incentives that would more than make up for the cost of living of an average child. With special needs children, there was the added concern of accommodations. Venlil society was not well built for a neurodiverse population. Still, the financial incentive meant that I was looking for experience with children, a history of de-escalation of some sort, that sort of thing. I had no idea what Karim was looking for, but he did not strike me as a particularly charitable evaluator.
We already had verbal children with translator implants whose next step would be adoption and regular outpatient evaluations. We needed to ensure there were plenty of opportunities for them, including prospective human adoptive parents. So I erred on the side of generosity, with the knowledge that all of those whose application was accepted would still have to have interviews, and regular check-ins, to ensure nothing untoward happened to the children.
I took another walk near the end of my shift, and saw that Kanarel was being given a tour by a security officer. I gave him a little wave and he waved back. Only one claw after he'd been hired and he'd already hit the ground running! A few of the human volunteers were staring, and whispering to each other. His appearance might prove a little stressful, but I figured they'd get used to him soon enough.
I checked on the production labs, translator stock was solid and we could give the girls the implant next week. I ran through some reports, flagged a few things for later analysis, updated my own files in the shared database, pulled some files from other facilities for later reviewing. It was a very productive day, all told.
Eventually, I finished my shift and sent an email to the whole facility, first requesting that any invasive tests for the "predator" children seek my approval before going forward, and second explaining that I would be reducing my shifts to 2 or occasionally 2.5 claws. If I had actually been well-rested, I wouldn't have dismissed Varla when she tried to tell me about the boys' horns. I hadn't had a weekend in a month and a half, but that could wait. First, no more twelve-hour shifts.
Plus, if I had smaller shifts, maybe I could have days with a late start, and days with an early start. That might help fight the "sliding" schedule I had fallen into, with my 6-claw "days" of 24 hours failing to fit into a 20-hour paw.
Larzo spotted me as I was getting ready to leave.
"I would like to request the Upper Salwick game you owe me," he said, and I smiled behind the mask.
"That sounds great, actually."
We got to his place a few minutes later. His hensa was deep asleep on a bed of pillows Larzo assured me was her own making.
After a few minutes, the reason Larzo thought I was sure to win was obvious. "Upper Salwick" was some sort of weird, strategic Jenga. Each player had a set of parts, and each turn you had to play one of each type, as you built your little structure out of alien toy building blocks. Then, each player had five balls which were to be tossed at the other player's structure. Or shot through a little tube you could use as a dart gun. If both structures survived unscathed, you removed one piece and tried to knock them down with the balls again.
Larzo and I were mostly evenly matched in our ability to build something that wouldn't collapse on its own. The alien building blocks were not quite as stable as LEGO blocks, and made a very gentle, smooth sound when they hit the ground. Both structures would be elevated on a little platform made up of parts of the box re-folded (really clever design, actually). Any blocks that fell off the platform were a point in your enemy's favour.
I learned playing with Larzo that humans are much better at throwing things than the entire fucking galaxy. If you could score in paper football, you could beat almost any non-human sophont in Upper Salwick.
The standard "strategy" was to build the tallest, thinnest, most physically stable structure, on the grounds that your opponent would need a meaningful amount of luck (given the expected distances between the players and the size of the balls) in order to knock it over. People built in Upper Salwick to avoid being knocked down. A pyramid was the most stable structure I could design with those blocks. It was also the most likely to be hit, but it survived two or three hits before the first block fell off. I played to be able to withstand being knocked down.
Larzo built some sort of tower and I knocked it down on my second shot. He hit my pyramid five times and only one block fell down.
"I knew it. Those arboreal eyes of yours! Lulling me into a false sense of security with that miss…"
"I haven't played beer pong in ten years, cut me some slack," I said. I used my last three balls to knock the remnants of his tower off the platform. By the end of the first round, I had a pyramid minus one block, and he had literally two pieces left out of the starting twenty-five.
"Are we playing elimination or standard?" he asked as he gathered his fallen pieces.
"That should have been settled before we started, dude, I didn't know there were variations."
"Well, I assumed standard, but now I am looking for an excuse to play another game," he said with a twinkle in his eyes.
I laughed. "I take it you underestimated how hard I would win?"
"I did not know it was possible to knock pieces off the platform after you had already collapsed your opponent's structure."
I struggled not to laugh. “Well, what do you want to do now?”
"Perhaps we could go to one of the human growling bars," Larzo said, and I nearly spat out my water.
"...The what?" I croaked, and had to clear my throat.
"They're not too far out by train, humans regularly walk from the refugee camps to them," he continued. I stared at him.
"Larzo, what the fuck is a growling bar?"
"I thought it was a human tradition," he said, like it was the most natural thing in the world. "Humans go to these bars and growl as loudly as they can, bellowing their grief of Earth's bombing. On occasion, I have passed by and heard screeches translated as 'yesterday, all my woes appeared to be distant, now it seems that they are permanent."
The realization hit me like a smack from Rodriguez. "No way. No. That's not–Are you calling that a growling bar?"
"Yes. What is the proper nomenclature, if not that?" he asked.
-----
Memory transcription subject: Lieutenant Asleth, Arxur Dominion Third Fleet.
Date [standardized human time]: Oct 19, 2136
When I volunteered to aid the humans after the bombing, I did not grasp the extent of their devotion to prey. I arrived at the Canadian space port near a vast, beautiful lake, and once there was taken to a hangar wherein I was made to wait.
And wait.
And wait, until that prophet-damned squealer would stop squirming with fear. They were not so far that I could not hear, but listening only exacerbated my exhaustion at the situation.
“You’re going to be perfectly safe,” said one of the humans. I worried that they would refuse our help altogether to appease it. That the only fellow sapients the Galaxy had to offer would reject us just the same as the prey had. That they would first love creatures that hated them, before any Arxur. No matter our help, our curiosity, our desire to join forces.
“No I’m not, and I’m not going to get myself eaten for you apes!” the creature squealed. How could humans stand for such disrespect?
“If you would like to resign, we can return you to your fleet–”
“No! I–I can do this, I can do this I—I can’t do this!”
“We specifically paired you with an Arxur whose job is primarily communications,” the human said patiently. “This is not a raider, or a front-line soldier.”
“It’s still a monster!”
I groaned from my place in the room, waiting on, and on… These tree-dwelling chatterboxes wouldn’t know an ally if they saved their species from extinction.
“I’m afraid we can’t turn down Arxur help right now. They’re much stronger than humans, having one on your team means we can send more of our own elsewhere. Help more people.”
“You’re telling me humans are too weak to protect me from those monsters?!”
“Well, no, we’ll still have armed men, but when it comes to pulling people out of rubble…”
There was a curious silence, after which the prey made a proposal.
“Call the translator tech. The one who worked with the prisoners. My friend worked with him. She said he could talk them down from anything. The [one who whispers at lizards].”
That was an interesting development. I leaned a little bit towards the wall, to see if I could hear better. There was a pause during what I assumed was the human speaker’s search for a communication device.
“Hey, Andes?.. You were scheduled to land today, would you by any chance still–Perfect. Can you come over to Hangar Bay five?.. I’m sorry, I know your contract–we’ll compensate you. Look, I have a Zurulian here who won’t set foot within prowling distance of our Arxur volunteer without you here… Not my fault you're famous... Time is lives, pal. See you in a few.”
“Well?” the prey creature squeaked.
“They’ll be here in a bit. We caught them just in time.”
The next few minutes were exhausting. Waiting in silence while mere metres away the humans coddled the terrified prey. Eventually, the door opened and I awakened from the haze of boredom.
In stepped a human in one of those formal sets of armour they wore with the white lining their ribcage, black layer on top, and the noose around their throats. Behind the human was the Zurulian, cowering, as they always did.
Behind the two of them came another human, wearing armour even less protective than the noose-wearer's. He(?) was further made distinct by the other humans in military armour, much like the ones I had seen around other bases, or in their communications network. Not to mention that the soldiers all stood straight, their bodies stiff, their jaws marked, while the civilian slouched and yawned, his body on its face weaker and softer than the soldiers’.
“Alright, Asleth was it?” the one in the black pelt with the noose said. I wondered briefly if it was a measure of trust. They wore a noose around their necks so that they could be more easily strangled, and thus their good behaviour was ensured…
“Yes,” I said. “I am Lieutenant Asleth, I work communications as you told the vermin, and volunteered to assist in the rescue of survivors from the city of Royalmount.”
“Perfect,” said the human. “This here is Dr. Rusen. These guys are Philippe, Francois, and David. And the newest recruit to the team, who will be working with Dr. Rusen, is Dr. Andes Savulescu-Ruiz.”
“Still not technically–” began Andes Savulescu-Ruiz, but the man in the noose waved him off.
“Close enough. You'll be doing first aid, checking victims for brain damage, so on. Anyhow, they’ll be working with you, Asleth, and keeping the peace for good ol’ Rusen here. All of you behave, the transport should be here real soon, and then it’ll be a long day’s work.”
The noose-wearing man gave us all a nod and wandered back out the door.
I looked at the least-armoured human and tried to remember their greeting rituals. He offered a hand and I shook it with my claws, doing my best not to dig into his flesh. “It is a pleasure to meet you, Doctor Andes Savulescu-Ruiz.”
“Just Andes is fine,” he said with a smile. I realized then that although the Zurulian was the only one cowering, the other humans were tense in my presence. This ‘Just Andes’ was the only one of the whole lot who did not make much distinction between me and his fellow humans. The rest seemed reluctant to approach, ready to betray my opened claw of friendship at a moment’s notice, should I prove a threat.
The transport arrived. It was two-tiered, with a front section large enough to seat five humans, and a back section that was very much an open box with some additional safety straps.
“We had to get a pickup truck to be able to carry the croc, I hope it’s not an issue,” said the human at the front of the vehicle. I did some quick accounting of the population and concluded I would likely be isolated in the back, waiting once again.
“I’ll ride with Asleth,” Andes said, “Rusen can go in the front with you guys."
There were a few nods, and the soldiers began to pour into the vehicle. I climbed aboard the back, and Andes hopped on as well with a litheness that surprised me given his looser, pudgier form in comparison to the soldiers. Within moments, the vehicle had begun to move and Andes had attached himself to it with a safety strap. Once on our way, he rummaged around in a bag to get a helmet much like the other soldiers’.
“So comms, eh? I’ve been working with a lot of Arxur in the past few months. I’m curious, can you tell me about your writing system?”
“...Our writing system?” I echoed. Of all the questions I expected to get from a human, this was not one of them.
“Yeah, I noticed that there are a lot of spikes, and the number of vowels--or analogues, anyhow--doesn’t seem to correlate with the length of a word, so I was wondering if you use diacritic marks, or…”
I stared blankly at him. “What are diacritic marks?”
His whole face lit up and he began to explain. The Arxur have teachers–we must, for we have things that ought be taught–but I had never before seen a creature so delighted by the opportunity to teach. Teachers were, in my experience, exasperated disciplinarians who disdained their duty to those who knew less than they. Andes found it joyous to speak, and it helped me find it joyous to listen. All humans, so far as I knew, had beautifully musical voices. Still, Andes’ had a light in it that I had heard from none others in my brief time on Earth, and my less brief time investigating their communications.
I wondered idly if my irritation at spending time with fellows was truly a mark of our people, or if we were simply not used to the joys of conversation that humans could bring forth. Perhaps this is what the Arxur of old had yearned for, before the Federation made itself known to us. A chance to converse with another sapient who was so very alien, and yet so much the same.
Translators had done a great deal to undermine the details of language. I did not much care if Zurulian was a subject-object-verb language or an object-verb-subject language, even as a communications officer. After all, what I heard was simply squealing in Zurulian, and most of my job involved sorting through potential alternative translations, investigating context, and discovering when a good time to attack might be. I had greater expertise in their (comically poor) encryption practices. Their tongue itself may as well have been a mystery.
“--Look, here, write me a sentence like ‘the rock falls in the water’,” he said, pulling forth a pad and a little wooden implement with graphite in the middle. I obliged though it felt rather odd to use an extra, wooden claw to write.
He looked at it. “Now please separate the words ‘rock’, ‘falls’ and ‘water’.”
I was confused. “That is not possible.”
His eyes grew, his pupils firmly focused on me. “...What?”
“It is not possible,” I repeated, “Rock is not just this,” I pointed to one of the sections. “It is also this,” I pointed to another. “Similarly, for it to fall on the water, then the falling must be…” My brow crinkled as I struggled for the term. He stared at me in anticipation. “The falling must be infected by the water.”
“Infected?” he asked.
“Yes. The words infect one another. Perhaps if I spoke of it as though it were a plan, ‘it is the arrangement for the rock to, in the future, fall upon the water’... Then the infection is that of the arrangement, and so rock, fall, and water are all affected by it, not by one another…”
I wrote it out in that fashion, and Andes stared in astonishment.
“Is this… Grammatical genders as tenses? Is this like the animate-inanimate distinction in Innu?” he mused, confusing me further. Were not all tongues so interwoven? “I swear, when this is all over, I need to go to Wriss. This is insane. What are those particles? How do abbreviations work? What’s the orthographic depth on this?”
I felt a need to thank the cowardly little creature for demanding Andes' presence. I realized at that moment that I had never seen a person be interested in the Arxur. We knew ourselves, or liked to think so. The Federation knew all they wished. His curiosity flattered me in ways I could not describe. It was an insistence, in itself, that I was worth learning about.
------
I will have to provide thanks to a variety of people, on the grounds that the past few weeks have not been good to my brain. u/Acceptable_Egg5560, u/cruisingNW, u/Liberty-Prime76, u/SavingSyllabus7788, u/AnEldritchroflcopter (who named Rusen), and someone whose reddit username I do not currently know, but will be editing in later if they so desire.
Everyone has been very kind, and I highly appreciate their generosity.
submitted by Eager_Question to NatureofPredators [link] [comments]
Date [standardized human time]: Dec 3 2136
I wandered up to the boys after Lihla got a bit bored of head scritches. Parents were still wandering around, but the three of them seemed pretty comfortable engaging in parallel play off in the back of the play room.
"Hello there," I said. I didn't have to be too mindful to avoid looming over them. They seemed largely unaffected by my size, and were themselves taller than some of the venlil nurses already. I wondered idly what the Arxur cut-offs for ages were. If we'd have to separate them from the girls.
"Your savageness," one said, bowing. "You honour us with your presence."
The other two bowed as well. The girls usually just scurried away, except for Lihla's insistence on "sitting with me". How differently had the boys been treated?
"That's um, that's not necessary," I said, gesticulating vaguely, "how are you boys doing?"
They stood up straight.
"I have been using the board to make squiggling lines," one said, pointing at the drawing board. "It is relaxing."
"I have been putting similar shapes together," said the next. He pointed at a table where he had sorted different blocks. One of the smaller girls looked tempted by his collection, and the fact that his attention was currently primarily on me. Just like Lihla, she moved in slow, incremental steps, ready to run away should her approach turn sour. I managed not to laugh, and kept my attention on the boys.
"I have been assembling the sticky triangles," said a third, and showed me a pretty good-looking geodesic dome he must have gotten just by building outward with the triangle magnets in a spiral pattern.
"Ah. Very nice. I was told you went to the doctor recently," I added.
"Yes, my teeth are very good and I am strong!"
"They tested my pain resistance with a big needle, but I did not scream," said the second one, clearly bragging.
"My appointment is later," said the third. I was a little impressed by how orderly they were. Like each of them knew their number in the order of who got to talk when.
"Well, that's good to know. If you find anything uncomfortable, please tell me so we can make it better for you," I said. They tilted their heads in confusion. "I'm Director Andes. You can ask to be brought to my office and any aide or nurse should be able to guide you there."
"I'm 857–" one started, and was quickly elbowed by the one next to him. He hissed in pain, then looked back at me and shook himself. "I'm Tito."
"I'm Julio."
"I'm Marco."
"Well, it's very nice to meet you boys," I said, smiling behind my visor. It was very exciting to hear them use the names they were given at the hospital. Aside from Lihla, none of the girls seemed very interested in getting names. A few of the nurses and aides had suggested some to them, but none had really stuck.
"It's nice to meet you, Savageness," Marcus said. To my and apparently his brothers' surprise, he jutted out a paw in front of him. I chuckled and shook it. The other two emulated Marcus, and I shook their paws as well. While I did that, the girl that had been eyeing Julio's collection stole a handful of blocks and scurried off to hide.
"Well, boys, I should be getting back to work now, but like I said, if you need help in any way, just ask for me."
They all nodded quickly. I gave Larzo a wave and headed back to my office. Once there, I updated Lihla’s file, made an appointment with Karim to discuss our situation, and finished the third batch of applications from prospective parents. I wasn't going to let him get his paws on it, especially given that they were in the lower income deciles. Venlil adoption incentives seemed to be meaningfully stronger than those of, say, Canada. In Canada, adoption often meant adoptive parents faced a wide variety of hurdles, but in Venlil Prime there were meaningful financial incentives that would more than make up for the cost of living of an average child. With special needs children, there was the added concern of accommodations. Venlil society was not well built for a neurodiverse population. Still, the financial incentive meant that I was looking for experience with children, a history of de-escalation of some sort, that sort of thing. I had no idea what Karim was looking for, but he did not strike me as a particularly charitable evaluator.
We already had verbal children with translator implants whose next step would be adoption and regular outpatient evaluations. We needed to ensure there were plenty of opportunities for them, including prospective human adoptive parents. So I erred on the side of generosity, with the knowledge that all of those whose application was accepted would still have to have interviews, and regular check-ins, to ensure nothing untoward happened to the children.
I took another walk near the end of my shift, and saw that Kanarel was being given a tour by a security officer. I gave him a little wave and he waved back. Only one claw after he'd been hired and he'd already hit the ground running! A few of the human volunteers were staring, and whispering to each other. His appearance might prove a little stressful, but I figured they'd get used to him soon enough.
I checked on the production labs, translator stock was solid and we could give the girls the implant next week. I ran through some reports, flagged a few things for later analysis, updated my own files in the shared database, pulled some files from other facilities for later reviewing. It was a very productive day, all told.
Eventually, I finished my shift and sent an email to the whole facility, first requesting that any invasive tests for the "predator" children seek my approval before going forward, and second explaining that I would be reducing my shifts to 2 or occasionally 2.5 claws. If I had actually been well-rested, I wouldn't have dismissed Varla when she tried to tell me about the boys' horns. I hadn't had a weekend in a month and a half, but that could wait. First, no more twelve-hour shifts.
Plus, if I had smaller shifts, maybe I could have days with a late start, and days with an early start. That might help fight the "sliding" schedule I had fallen into, with my 6-claw "days" of 24 hours failing to fit into a 20-hour paw.
Larzo spotted me as I was getting ready to leave.
"I would like to request the Upper Salwick game you owe me," he said, and I smiled behind the mask.
"That sounds great, actually."
We got to his place a few minutes later. His hensa was deep asleep on a bed of pillows Larzo assured me was her own making.
After a few minutes, the reason Larzo thought I was sure to win was obvious. "Upper Salwick" was some sort of weird, strategic Jenga. Each player had a set of parts, and each turn you had to play one of each type, as you built your little structure out of alien toy building blocks. Then, each player had five balls which were to be tossed at the other player's structure. Or shot through a little tube you could use as a dart gun. If both structures survived unscathed, you removed one piece and tried to knock them down with the balls again.
Larzo and I were mostly evenly matched in our ability to build something that wouldn't collapse on its own. The alien building blocks were not quite as stable as LEGO blocks, and made a very gentle, smooth sound when they hit the ground. Both structures would be elevated on a little platform made up of parts of the box re-folded (really clever design, actually). Any blocks that fell off the platform were a point in your enemy's favour.
I learned playing with Larzo that humans are much better at throwing things than the entire fucking galaxy. If you could score in paper football, you could beat almost any non-human sophont in Upper Salwick.
The standard "strategy" was to build the tallest, thinnest, most physically stable structure, on the grounds that your opponent would need a meaningful amount of luck (given the expected distances between the players and the size of the balls) in order to knock it over. People built in Upper Salwick to avoid being knocked down. A pyramid was the most stable structure I could design with those blocks. It was also the most likely to be hit, but it survived two or three hits before the first block fell off. I played to be able to withstand being knocked down.
Larzo built some sort of tower and I knocked it down on my second shot. He hit my pyramid five times and only one block fell down.
"I knew it. Those arboreal eyes of yours! Lulling me into a false sense of security with that miss…"
"I haven't played beer pong in ten years, cut me some slack," I said. I used my last three balls to knock the remnants of his tower off the platform. By the end of the first round, I had a pyramid minus one block, and he had literally two pieces left out of the starting twenty-five.
"Are we playing elimination or standard?" he asked as he gathered his fallen pieces.
"That should have been settled before we started, dude, I didn't know there were variations."
"Well, I assumed standard, but now I am looking for an excuse to play another game," he said with a twinkle in his eyes.
I laughed. "I take it you underestimated how hard I would win?"
"I did not know it was possible to knock pieces off the platform after you had already collapsed your opponent's structure."
I struggled not to laugh. “Well, what do you want to do now?”
"Perhaps we could go to one of the human growling bars," Larzo said, and I nearly spat out my water.
"...The what?" I croaked, and had to clear my throat.
"They're not too far out by train, humans regularly walk from the refugee camps to them," he continued. I stared at him.
"Larzo, what the fuck is a growling bar?"
"I thought it was a human tradition," he said, like it was the most natural thing in the world. "Humans go to these bars and growl as loudly as they can, bellowing their grief of Earth's bombing. On occasion, I have passed by and heard screeches translated as 'yesterday, all my woes appeared to be distant, now it seems that they are permanent."
The realization hit me like a smack from Rodriguez. "No way. No. That's not–Are you calling that a growling bar?"
"Yes. What is the proper nomenclature, if not that?" he asked.
-----
Memory transcription subject: Lieutenant Asleth, Arxur Dominion Third Fleet.
Date [standardized human time]: Oct 19, 2136
When I volunteered to aid the humans after the bombing, I did not grasp the extent of their devotion to prey. I arrived at the Canadian space port near a vast, beautiful lake, and once there was taken to a hangar wherein I was made to wait.
And wait.
And wait, until that prophet-damned squealer would stop squirming with fear. They were not so far that I could not hear, but listening only exacerbated my exhaustion at the situation.
“You’re going to be perfectly safe,” said one of the humans. I worried that they would refuse our help altogether to appease it. That the only fellow sapients the Galaxy had to offer would reject us just the same as the prey had. That they would first love creatures that hated them, before any Arxur. No matter our help, our curiosity, our desire to join forces.
“No I’m not, and I’m not going to get myself eaten for you apes!” the creature squealed. How could humans stand for such disrespect?
“If you would like to resign, we can return you to your fleet–”
“No! I–I can do this, I can do this I—I can’t do this!”
“We specifically paired you with an Arxur whose job is primarily communications,” the human said patiently. “This is not a raider, or a front-line soldier.”
“It’s still a monster!”
I groaned from my place in the room, waiting on, and on… These tree-dwelling chatterboxes wouldn’t know an ally if they saved their species from extinction.
“I’m afraid we can’t turn down Arxur help right now. They’re much stronger than humans, having one on your team means we can send more of our own elsewhere. Help more people.”
“You’re telling me humans are too weak to protect me from those monsters?!”
“Well, no, we’ll still have armed men, but when it comes to pulling people out of rubble…”
There was a curious silence, after which the prey made a proposal.
“Call the translator tech. The one who worked with the prisoners. My friend worked with him. She said he could talk them down from anything. The [one who whispers at lizards].”
That was an interesting development. I leaned a little bit towards the wall, to see if I could hear better. There was a pause during what I assumed was the human speaker’s search for a communication device.
“Hey, Andes?.. You were scheduled to land today, would you by any chance still–Perfect. Can you come over to Hangar Bay five?.. I’m sorry, I know your contract–we’ll compensate you. Look, I have a Zurulian here who won’t set foot within prowling distance of our Arxur volunteer without you here… Not my fault you're famous... Time is lives, pal. See you in a few.”
“Well?” the prey creature squeaked.
“They’ll be here in a bit. We caught them just in time.”
The next few minutes were exhausting. Waiting in silence while mere metres away the humans coddled the terrified prey. Eventually, the door opened and I awakened from the haze of boredom.
In stepped a human in one of those formal sets of armour they wore with the white lining their ribcage, black layer on top, and the noose around their throats. Behind the human was the Zurulian, cowering, as they always did.
Behind the two of them came another human, wearing armour even less protective than the noose-wearer's. He(?) was further made distinct by the other humans in military armour, much like the ones I had seen around other bases, or in their communications network. Not to mention that the soldiers all stood straight, their bodies stiff, their jaws marked, while the civilian slouched and yawned, his body on its face weaker and softer than the soldiers’.
“Alright, Asleth was it?” the one in the black pelt with the noose said. I wondered briefly if it was a measure of trust. They wore a noose around their necks so that they could be more easily strangled, and thus their good behaviour was ensured…
“Yes,” I said. “I am Lieutenant Asleth, I work communications as you told the vermin, and volunteered to assist in the rescue of survivors from the city of Royalmount.”
“Perfect,” said the human. “This here is Dr. Rusen. These guys are Philippe, Francois, and David. And the newest recruit to the team, who will be working with Dr. Rusen, is Dr. Andes Savulescu-Ruiz.”
“Still not technically–” began Andes Savulescu-Ruiz, but the man in the noose waved him off.
“Close enough. You'll be doing first aid, checking victims for brain damage, so on. Anyhow, they’ll be working with you, Asleth, and keeping the peace for good ol’ Rusen here. All of you behave, the transport should be here real soon, and then it’ll be a long day’s work.”
The noose-wearing man gave us all a nod and wandered back out the door.
I looked at the least-armoured human and tried to remember their greeting rituals. He offered a hand and I shook it with my claws, doing my best not to dig into his flesh. “It is a pleasure to meet you, Doctor Andes Savulescu-Ruiz.”
“Just Andes is fine,” he said with a smile. I realized then that although the Zurulian was the only one cowering, the other humans were tense in my presence. This ‘Just Andes’ was the only one of the whole lot who did not make much distinction between me and his fellow humans. The rest seemed reluctant to approach, ready to betray my opened claw of friendship at a moment’s notice, should I prove a threat.
The transport arrived. It was two-tiered, with a front section large enough to seat five humans, and a back section that was very much an open box with some additional safety straps.
“We had to get a pickup truck to be able to carry the croc, I hope it’s not an issue,” said the human at the front of the vehicle. I did some quick accounting of the population and concluded I would likely be isolated in the back, waiting once again.
“I’ll ride with Asleth,” Andes said, “Rusen can go in the front with you guys."
There were a few nods, and the soldiers began to pour into the vehicle. I climbed aboard the back, and Andes hopped on as well with a litheness that surprised me given his looser, pudgier form in comparison to the soldiers. Within moments, the vehicle had begun to move and Andes had attached himself to it with a safety strap. Once on our way, he rummaged around in a bag to get a helmet much like the other soldiers’.
“So comms, eh? I’ve been working with a lot of Arxur in the past few months. I’m curious, can you tell me about your writing system?”
“...Our writing system?” I echoed. Of all the questions I expected to get from a human, this was not one of them.
“Yeah, I noticed that there are a lot of spikes, and the number of vowels--or analogues, anyhow--doesn’t seem to correlate with the length of a word, so I was wondering if you use diacritic marks, or…”
I stared blankly at him. “What are diacritic marks?”
His whole face lit up and he began to explain. The Arxur have teachers–we must, for we have things that ought be taught–but I had never before seen a creature so delighted by the opportunity to teach. Teachers were, in my experience, exasperated disciplinarians who disdained their duty to those who knew less than they. Andes found it joyous to speak, and it helped me find it joyous to listen. All humans, so far as I knew, had beautifully musical voices. Still, Andes’ had a light in it that I had heard from none others in my brief time on Earth, and my less brief time investigating their communications.
I wondered idly if my irritation at spending time with fellows was truly a mark of our people, or if we were simply not used to the joys of conversation that humans could bring forth. Perhaps this is what the Arxur of old had yearned for, before the Federation made itself known to us. A chance to converse with another sapient who was so very alien, and yet so much the same.
Translators had done a great deal to undermine the details of language. I did not much care if Zurulian was a subject-object-verb language or an object-verb-subject language, even as a communications officer. After all, what I heard was simply squealing in Zurulian, and most of my job involved sorting through potential alternative translations, investigating context, and discovering when a good time to attack might be. I had greater expertise in their (comically poor) encryption practices. Their tongue itself may as well have been a mystery.
“--Look, here, write me a sentence like ‘the rock falls in the water’,” he said, pulling forth a pad and a little wooden implement with graphite in the middle. I obliged though it felt rather odd to use an extra, wooden claw to write.
He looked at it. “Now please separate the words ‘rock’, ‘falls’ and ‘water’.”
I was confused. “That is not possible.”
His eyes grew, his pupils firmly focused on me. “...What?”
“It is not possible,” I repeated, “Rock is not just this,” I pointed to one of the sections. “It is also this,” I pointed to another. “Similarly, for it to fall on the water, then the falling must be…” My brow crinkled as I struggled for the term. He stared at me in anticipation. “The falling must be infected by the water.”
“Infected?” he asked.
“Yes. The words infect one another. Perhaps if I spoke of it as though it were a plan, ‘it is the arrangement for the rock to, in the future, fall upon the water’... Then the infection is that of the arrangement, and so rock, fall, and water are all affected by it, not by one another…”
I wrote it out in that fashion, and Andes stared in astonishment.
“Is this… Grammatical genders as tenses? Is this like the animate-inanimate distinction in Innu?” he mused, confusing me further. Were not all tongues so interwoven? “I swear, when this is all over, I need to go to Wriss. This is insane. What are those particles? How do abbreviations work? What’s the orthographic depth on this?”
I felt a need to thank the cowardly little creature for demanding Andes' presence. I realized at that moment that I had never seen a person be interested in the Arxur. We knew ourselves, or liked to think so. The Federation knew all they wished. His curiosity flattered me in ways I could not describe. It was an insistence, in itself, that I was worth learning about.
------
I will have to provide thanks to a variety of people, on the grounds that the past few weeks have not been good to my brain. u/Acceptable_Egg5560, u/cruisingNW, u/Liberty-Prime76, u/SavingSyllabus7788, u/AnEldritchroflcopter (who named Rusen), and someone whose reddit username I do not currently know, but will be editing in later if they so desire.
Everyone has been very kind, and I highly appreciate their generosity.
2023.06.03 15:33 HS-Tripper PC build for SO (£900 Budget)
What will you be doing with this PC? Be as specific as possible, and include specific games or programs you will be using.
- She is a teacher so she'll be using it for lesson planning but she also enjoys gaming and web and video browsing.
What is your maximum budget before rebates/shipping/taxes?
- £900
When do you plan on building/buying the PC? Note: beyond a week or two from today means any build you receive will be out of date when you want to buy.
- Within a month
What, exactly, do you need included in the budget? (ToweOS/monitokeyboard/mouse/etc)
- Just the parts and tower (Excluding the GPU)
Which country (and state/province) will you be purchasing the parts in? If you're in US, do you have access to a Microcenter location?
- UK
If reusing any parts (including monitor(s)/keyboard/mouse/etc), what parts will you be reusing? Brands and models are appreciated.
- ASUS TUF OC 3070 Ti, 24 Inch MSI 144hz monitor
Will you be overclocking? If yes, are you interested in overclocking right away, or down the line? CPU and/or GPU?
- No
Are there any specific features or items you want/need in the build? (ex: SSD, large amount of storage or a RAID setup, CUDA or OpenCL support, etc)
- 2TB SSD
Do you have any specific case preferences (Size like ITX/microATX/mid-towefull-tower, styles, colors, window or not, LED lighting, etc), or a particular color theme preference for the components?
- She favours the Fractal Design Pop Mini look so possibly MicroATX size for any other recommendation. She would also prefer a white or bright case.
Do you need a copy of Windows included in the budget? If you do need one included, do you have a preference?
- No
Extra info or particulars:She is a teacher that's always had a painfully slow laptop for her job so just any PC build that is reliable and quick would be perfect.
Many thanks! :)
2023.06.03 15:32 PoopInToilet All Season Tires Year Round On M3P?
Has anyone switched to 19 inch all season tires on the M3P in a cold climate (midwest) and keep them on year round? If so, how is the efficiency and performance compared to the 20 inch Ubers?
submitted by PoopInToilet to TeslaModel3 [link] [comments]
2023.06.03 15:31 Worldly_State9145 AITA for refusing to move in with my BF?
Throwaray
Yesterday my (32F) boyfriend (32M) asked me to move in with him. We've been together for about 4 years and I love him very much, he's the kindest, handsomest, funniest man I've even known.
The thing is, he's got a 4yo cat that likes to pee on stuff. He uses his litterbox, but he's also peed on countless cloths, clothes and shoes. He pees on every rug availabe and has peed on the sofa. The house has that distinct ammonia smell underlying everything most of the time. He's peed on an old laptop once, and recently peed on the desk I use to work, aiming at my folder, which had countless annotations for my master's degree, and also splattering on my Kindle.
I've pointed to BF a few times that maybe there's also some underlying health problem with the cat, and he's also not castrated. BF suggested that, since the cat has grown around a dog who used hygienic carpets, maybe he acquired the habit, and have been saying that he'll look into it anyway, but putting it off. He won't accept my help, though, bc he feels it's his obligation.
I'll add that I'm a cat person. I've grown around cats and currently have 2 I adopted myself and would also be moving with me. And BFs cat is super cute and friendly; I really adore him, when I'm not cleaning off pee or sniffing around the sofa to make sure I won't sit on it.
Here's where I may be TA: when he asked me to move in with him (his place is arguably nicer and the town is better), I said no. He was obviously hurt and I explained that I do want to live with him, but I don't want to deal with the cat's pee 24/7. I said that he has to sort this out first and I am more than willing to help, but I wouldn't risk my cats learning this kind of behavior anyway.
I could see that he was hurt, and I'm feeling bad for upsetting him. However, I don't think it's an unreasonable request. Reddit, AITA?
submitted by Worldly_State9145 to AmItheAsshole [link] [comments]
Yesterday my (32F) boyfriend (32M) asked me to move in with him. We've been together for about 4 years and I love him very much, he's the kindest, handsomest, funniest man I've even known.
The thing is, he's got a 4yo cat that likes to pee on stuff. He uses his litterbox, but he's also peed on countless cloths, clothes and shoes. He pees on every rug availabe and has peed on the sofa. The house has that distinct ammonia smell underlying everything most of the time. He's peed on an old laptop once, and recently peed on the desk I use to work, aiming at my folder, which had countless annotations for my master's degree, and also splattering on my Kindle.
I've pointed to BF a few times that maybe there's also some underlying health problem with the cat, and he's also not castrated. BF suggested that, since the cat has grown around a dog who used hygienic carpets, maybe he acquired the habit, and have been saying that he'll look into it anyway, but putting it off. He won't accept my help, though, bc he feels it's his obligation.
I'll add that I'm a cat person. I've grown around cats and currently have 2 I adopted myself and would also be moving with me. And BFs cat is super cute and friendly; I really adore him, when I'm not cleaning off pee or sniffing around the sofa to make sure I won't sit on it.
Here's where I may be TA: when he asked me to move in with him (his place is arguably nicer and the town is better), I said no. He was obviously hurt and I explained that I do want to live with him, but I don't want to deal with the cat's pee 24/7. I said that he has to sort this out first and I am more than willing to help, but I wouldn't risk my cats learning this kind of behavior anyway.
I could see that he was hurt, and I'm feeling bad for upsetting him. However, I don't think it's an unreasonable request. Reddit, AITA?
2023.06.03 15:27 Tania-Art Poppies and Cornflowers in the field, watercolor on paper and canvas, 24 x 20 x 1 inches. Reflections from one summer day in the field. What do you think about it?
 | submitted by Tania-Art to Watercolor [link] [comments] |
2023.06.03 15:27 Tania-Art Poppies and Cornflowers in the field, watercolor on paper and canvas, 24 x 20 x 1 inches. Reflections from one summer day in the field. What do you think about it?
 | submitted by Tania-Art to true_art [link] [comments] |
2023.06.03 15:27 Tania-Art Poppies and Cornflowers in the field, watercolor on paper and canvas, 24 x 20 x 1 inches. Reflections from one summer day in the field. What do you think about it?
 | submitted by Tania-Art to Paintings [link] [comments] |
2023.06.03 15:27 Tania-Art Poppies and Cornflowers in the field, watercolor on paper and canvas, 24 x 20 x 1 inches. Reflections from one summer day in the field. What do you think about it?
 | submitted by Tania-Art to painting [link] [comments] |
2023.06.03 15:27 Tania-Art Poppies and Cornflowers in the field, watercolor on paper and canvas, 24 x 20 x 1 inches. Reflections from one summer day in the field. What do you think about it?
 | submitted by Tania-Art to landscape [link] [comments] |
2023.06.03 15:27 Tania-Art Poppies and Cornflowers in the field, watercolor on paper and canvas, 24 x 20 x 1 inches. Reflections from one summer day in the field. What do you think about it?
 | submitted by Tania-Art to arttocope [link] [comments] |
2023.06.03 15:25 Tanbelia Poppies and Cornflowers in the field, watercolor on paper and canvas, 24 x 20 x 1 inches. Reflections from one summer day in the field. What do you think about it?
 | submitted by Tanbelia to wtfart [link] [comments] |
2023.06.03 15:25 Tanbelia Poppies and Cornflowers in the field, watercolor on paper and canvas, 24 x 20 x 1 inches. Reflections from one summer day in the field. What do you think about it?
 | submitted by Tanbelia to wildart [link] [comments] |
2023.06.03 15:25 Tanbelia Poppies and Cornflowers in the field, watercolor on paper and canvas, 24 x 20 x 1 inches. Reflections from one summer day in the field. What do you think about it?
submitted by Tanbelia to watercolour [link] [comments]
2023.06.03 15:25 Tanbelia Poppies and Cornflowers in the field, watercolor on paper and canvas, 24 x 20 x 1 inches. Reflections from one summer day in the field. What do you think about it?
 | submitted by Tanbelia to watercolorarts [link] [comments] |
2023.06.03 15:24 Tanbelia Poppies and Cornflowers in the field, watercolor on paper and canvas, 24 x 20 x 1 inches. Reflections from one summer day in the field. What do you think about it?
submitted by Tanbelia to watercolor101 [link] [comments]
2023.06.03 15:24 Tanbelia Poppies and Cornflowers in the field, watercolor on paper and canvas, 24 x 20 x 1 inches. Reflections from one summer day in the field. What do you think about it?
 | submitted by Tanbelia to wallart [link] [comments] |
2023.06.03 15:24 Tanbelia Poppies and Cornflowers in the field, watercolor on paper and canvas, 24 x 20 x 1 inches. Reflections from one summer day in the field. What do you think about it?
 | submitted by Tanbelia to UnusualArt [link] [comments] |
2023.06.03 15:23 Tanbelia Poppies and Cornflowers in the field, watercolor on paper and canvas, 24 x 20 x 1 inches. Reflections from one summer day in the field. What do you think about it?
 | submitted by Tanbelia to trippyart [link] [comments] |
2023.06.03 15:23 Tanbelia Poppies and Cornflowers in the field, watercolor on paper and canvas, 24 x 20 x 1 inches. Reflections from one summer day in the field. What do you think about it?
 | submitted by Tanbelia to trippy [link] [comments] |
2023.06.03 15:23 Tanbelia Poppies and Cornflowers in the field, watercolor on paper and canvas, 24 x 20 x 1 inches. Reflections from one summer day in the field. What do you think about it?
 | submitted by Tanbelia to TheWayToBeauty [link] [comments] |