Evelyn Berry

Issue 16

Flash Fiction

Flora arrived twenty minutes late to her brunch shift. Her sweat-drenched uniform, a black button-up and butter-smeared slacks, adhered to her skin. Charleston in late summer had been stuck under some cruel toddler’s magnifying glass. She clocked in and spun, nearly colliding with Patrick. Her manager, a forty-something man fake-tanned until his skin resembled a deflated basketball, wore a blue blazer, skinny jeans, and boat shoes. She expected a tirade. Her heart plummeted when instead he smiled at her, sweet as peach cobbler.

“The other kid no-call-no-showed.” Patrick performatively shook his head, as if two days before, he had not screamed at this college-aged busboy for not adding enough sugar to the sweet tea. “So, bro, I have a favor to ask.”

The Mermaid Riot occupied a two-story historic house on a narrow street that, in Flora’s imagination, divided the overpriced boutiques of King Street from the tourist side of town, where just a block further the sprawling Charleston Market sold benne wafers, sweetgrass baskets, and t-shirts screen-printed with Palmetto trees. She had been, for three months, the new busboy, though since the restaurant was fancy, her official title was server’s assistant. This meant she cleared dirty tables and refilled sweet tea on command, tonight for both dining rooms. Flora joined Camilla, an older server with dyed-red hair, in the prep work of rolling silverware. She flipped a switch into an automatic mode. Twenty minutes later, her arms and legs moved on their own, her mind an endless tape of self-instruction.

Table five needed a refill—coffee, water, Diet Dr. Pepper, Shirley Temple with two maraschino cherries and a slice of orange. Table seven grabbed Flora’s shirt sleeve to remind her about the strawberry preserve for their biscuits, now cooling into hard pucks on the table. The woman at table fifteen waved, a frantic karate chop through the dining room’s jazzy Muzak.

The biscuits. She needed to go upstairs and take the biscuits from the oven.

She fled from the dining room and caught a dirty look from Camilla, who placed two empty pitchers in Flora’s hands to fill. In midday, the kitchen trembled with trapped heat. The back-of-house staff—two stoner cooks, a sous-chef who hated her, and the stoic dishwasher—spoke in monosyllabic commands and warnings, “Sharp!” “Hands!” “Hot!” punctuated only by the sous-chef growling at Flora: “You better not leave without running something, dude.” Plates crowded the window waiting on servers to pick them up. Once she filled the tea pitchers, she bustled out the kitchen without looking behind her.

She handed off the pitchers in the corridor to Camilla and stomped up the service stairwell, a relic from the house’s nineteenth-century past. The upstairs kitchen was used primarily as a prep area on weekends by the pastry chef and didn’t clang with chaos. During the week, this kitchen belonged primarily to the biscuit-makers, the busboys. When she turned the corner, however, she was surprised to see Patrick looming over the prep table.

“You idiot,” he said and held up a tray of blackened biscuits between mitts of folded rags.

“I was trying to—”

He shoved the tray into Flora’s bare hands. She yelped like a cat whose tail had been stepped on. Her hands seared with pain, and she let the tray clatter to the floor. Biscuits bounced, spraying crumb debris across the tiles. She lurched for the sink and held her singed palms, welts already bubbling, under a cascade of lukewarm water.

“You went and burned yourself.” Patrick gestured at the biscuit fluff littering the kitchen. “Bro, are you going to at least clean this up?”

She didn’t answer. For a moment, she felt no anger or embarrassment, only the flare of pain. She focused on the sound of water, the sensation of cold dousing her skin like a knife scraped across cement. Then she glared at Patrick, lifted a new tray of biscuits from a rack in the corner, and slid it into the oven. 

She whispered to herself, “Water, coffee, Dr. Pepper, Shirley Temple. Two cherries.”

When she returned to the downstairs dining room, she slammed the drinks on the table, then spun to retrieve the water pitcher. One of the men at the table sighed dramatically. “Finally,” he said and sipped his soda. Then, “Come on, man. I actually ordered Diet Dr. Pepper.”

Dude. Man. Bro. They were probably not clocking her, but still, the words stung. Five months on hormones, she was only beginning to feel happy about the way she looked and stop obsessing about whether she passed. In the shower this morning, she carefully shaved the springy black hairs on her forearms and legs, even her tits and the tops of her feet. Unable to afford laser, she slathered her face with a red corrector and foundation to camouflage the beard shadow. A headache, like someone had brained her with an aluminum bat. She poured water for the table, not responding.

The man shoved the soda at Flora, who failed to catch the cup before it slid off the table and crashed to the floor. She dropped to her knees and mopped the sticky puddle with two rags pulled from her apron. Closing her eyes, she began to count down from ten. When she was a kid, she learned this trick from a television show. 

Ten. Nine.

She couldn’t panic or freak out or raise her voice and risk losing her job.

Eight. Seven.

Camilla tapped her shoulder. “Get to the kitchen now.”

Six. Five.

In the kitchen, Flora dropped the soaked rags in the mop bucket.

Four.

The chef rolled his eyes. “Stop wasting time. We’ve got hot plates to run.”

Three.

Instead, she beelined for the walk-in.

Two.

She closed the heavy door and wiped her sweat-slicked face with her last rag. She breathed in cold air and held it in her lungs, as if she could take some of this peace with her when she walked out.