The white fluorescent lights tinge the kitchen with a disorienting consistency as it lacks windows to reveal if the sun has risen yet. On the way in, you watch the streetlights drift in and out of dusted windows in sync with the metal, grinding wheels of the train. When the bright, red numbers told you it was four in the morning in their daily screech, you rose in the dark. You went to sleep the night before, degraded from the long hours and buckets of sweat spoiled on shitty customers and spoiled food.
The front door swings open and rings a muted, rusty bell looped on the top hinge. The first customer is a man wearing a weathered, black leather jacket over a grease-stained Celtics t-shirt. You’d seen him here dozens of times, cooked his food for him dozens of times. Doesn’t make him act like any less of an asshole. He was a regular before you started working here two and a half years ago, yeesh has it been that long? The guy always takes his time with the menu, and asks “Any specials?” before you have to read him the specials for the day posted up in bold letters right in front of his patchy-bearded mug.
It gets slow around three when you get your break. Thirty minutes for you to sit in your car and bang your head against the window while you eat a sandwich you accidentally doused in mustard when the lid came off. It’s that or you try to last five minutes having a smoke with Georgie on the stoop before he says the most racist shit ya ever heard in your life. Ol’ Georgie has been here before you, before Celtic’s fan, probably before the foundation was laid on the building he was here, cutting onions.
“Corner”, you say as you dash through the kitchen with a bucket of ingredients that’d been marinating in the freezer. One of our many “world-famous”, “Boston classic” “secret recipes” that we been churning out since the last time Georgie got laid. We put it on everything from sandwiches to sausage rolls to hot dogs we even made a shepherd’s pie with ’em that wasn’t half bad, really. That’s why it’s a big deal you say corner because when somebody slams into you, knocks the bucket into the air, sending onions ‘n carrots floating beneath the stoves, it won’t be your fault.
You flip through your keys again until you see the one with a bit of rust on the tip, that’s your door key. You’ve been meaning to label it so you don’t have to look so hard but ya keep forgetting. You toss ’em on the couch and drape your coat on that old rack you found missing a leg outside near the dumpster. It’s nice wood, would’ve been a waste. You pass a mirror and realize you’re still wearing your apron; you’d been wearing it the whole train ride to 51st street then you wore it for the whole ten-minute walk into your apartment. Your hair is greased, maybe even receding, and the bags under your eyes are almost as heavy as your soul when your AC won’t turn on.
