Celery and Other Things
Profitron contains absurd, satirical and funny short fiction. Influences include Pynchon, DeLillo, Vonnegut and Norm Macdonald (all lovers of SEO). Now it’s time for the news.
For the first time, Roger was quiet. Bethany had served him coffee for over a year now and Roger was always the first to speak. He was a man of habit. Each morning he picked the same seat, and each morning, once Bethany had reversed through the door with his coffee, Roger would finger-drum the tabletop and greet her. Every time was the same, always a broad smile and a question: How you doing today, young lady? How’s the singing? How are the chickens and the rabbit and your mother?
But that morning, Roger was silent. He neither spoke nor acknowledged Bethany’s existence. Instead he focused down the road at a street sign, at beyond the street sign.
There was something important Bethany wanted to say that morning. She wanted to tell Roger that she took his advice, that she sent a recording to that singing school and expected a response today. She wanted to say thank you. That’s why she hovered over Roger’s shoulder for so long. Bethany hoped he would look up but her smile soon vanished and she went inside.
Bethany worked at that cafe full-time. Maybe she was lonely. Maybe it was lonely for a girl who, at sixteen, left school to help her mother pay the rent. Maybe all the other kids have classmates and friends and time, when Bethany has seemingly little by comparison. Maybe Roger was one of the few who smiled in her life, one of the few who laughed. But maybe Bethany wrongly thought she played a role in that. Maybe she meant nothing to him.
Outside, Roger’s solid face wore the blank expression of a cadaver. Bethany studied him from behind the coffee machine and wondered, “What the hell is he thinking?”
Oh, utopia. My wretched life was plagued by the promise of perfection, of utopia.
I am thirty-three, by no means old, but I should be more established. I should be many things. I had benchmarks for this age. There were guidelines, goals jotted in Excel documents, colour-coded, tracked. But I ask you, where is my wife? I hold the coffee still and check under the wobbly table. There are no children there. There are no friends by the register or the juice fridge, all mine come in Amazon boxes. They keep me numb, penniless. Because wait a second, this is Monopoly money, this is a Monopoly house I rent. This is all fake. This is all empty and fake, and when I audit my life, when I spin my head like a radar face in search, I gawk, for there is nothing bright and shining at all, certainly no utopia.
By this age I was supposed to have ten-pack abs (maybe even twelve). My face, not my hair, was supposed to have thinned; that was a Men’s Health magazine promise: Seven Ways to Get a Square Head. But despite the carrot juice enemas, my head is still a circle and I feel robbed.
Come to think of it, where is my podcast? Where is my talk show? Where is my black belt in karate? Why can’t I chop blocks of wood, concrete and hard bone in two? Why can’t I fight three men to defend the honour of four women at five in the morning? Why the six pack of beer seven days a week? Who gave me these turned up, infinite limitations? My penis is not nine inches and I’d like ten words with God, or at the very least the tape measure manufacturer. Yes I’ll wait. Please know, though, that Saint Peter will have to drag me from the waiting room by my exposed pubes, and all the way out I’ll be screaming, “Where are my inches, Lord? You’ve clipped me like a cigar. Don’t leave me here with these golf magazines. I know you’re in there.”
It’s a disgrace. That’s what it is, a disgrace: to be such a mediocre man, a thirty-three year old nobody, no good nor use to anybody. That’s how I saw my lot, anyway. I realise now, however, I simply needed to be realistic.
So this morning I said to the mirror, “Hey, Football Head, did you actually think marriage was a possibility? Did you actually expect to be a father? Be honest now. What woman could love a man like you? You write corporate documents for a living. You don’t exactly fuck like James Bond. Everyone says those accents you enjoy are racist. Reassess your expectations, Stud.” Then we laughed and we dressed and we came to the cafe feeling liberated, light. The mirror and I had simply expected too much of life.
My new outlook on life is one of realism. A realist would not say I ‘make a living’ writing corporate documents. A realist would say I write corporate documents for a salary, a salary I use to buy celery and other things. A realist would then say there is nothing wrong with drafting pointless emails, committee agenda, minutes, business cases, ministerial briefings, talking points, corporate strategies… After all this is how the world works; a realist knows that. Instead I should put bureaucratic (level: native) in the language section of my CV. Then advance to go and collect the $200. Fuck everything else.’
Let everyone who ever wronged you have right of way. Just step aside. Stop trying to be better, to be more, for you are nothing, and that is fine. How freeing the thought, to be spared utopia.
The morning rushed, and when Bethany next glanced outside, Roger was gone. He left the cup and saucer scattered and his chair abandoned so far from the table it looked like a separate entity, like some dunce chair on the red brick where a customer could order eggs benedict and eat it on their lap. Leaving like that was a rude gesture, she thought.
Most days Roger brings in his coffee cup and saucer and rests it on the kitchen sill to help the wait staff. Then he stays for another chat. He dresses like an old man and talks with hands in his pockets. His wide face, that big smile, was such a dependable comfort. You’ll figure it out, Beth, he’d say. Just keep trying. Never give up, never. One day-
“Excuse me,” interrupted a shrill voice.
Bethany turned but it was hard to pinpoint the source among the full tables. She searched the faces and soon found the old woman staring and pointing at an egg on her decorated plate.
“I didn’t ask for this,” said the woman. “I didn’t want this.”
Bethany peered outside, down the road at the street sign, at beyond the sign.
“Excuse me,” repeated the woman. “Girl, look at me when I’m talking to you.”
Clearly the egg was causing the woman significant distress, and Bethany, who did not cook the egg, apparently deserved the woman’s scorn (hospitality logic). But Bethany was just a kid. She was seventeen and was having a rough go of it all. It’s tough being that young and alone, so deprived of hope that expecting anything positive becomes a source of guilt.
“I’m sorry,” she said, with a nervous smile. “How can I help you?”
The woman had weathered skin and golden bracelets. Her eyes burned like they were once dipped in hell and never the same, and they scanned the young woman from the toes to the skinny arms, to the fake tattoos on her wrist drawn with pen in a vacant moment.
“You know,” began the woman, a thin smile appearing on her lips, “you are here to wait on me, not the other way around. If I ask you a question, then you answer it. Understood?”
Bethany’s left hand gripped her right elbow. Her feet shuffled. There was no escape but for the deep fryer or the oncoming traffic. Her pale cheeks turned red. The woman spoke again.
“Anytime today would be nice-”
“But you didn’t ask me a question, did you?” snapped Bethany, surprising even herself.
Then the woman demanded to speak to the manager, who was already glaring at Bethany, and seeing his anger caused the young woman’s instincts to take over. She ran to the bathroom and locked the door. Inside, tears fell on her blue apron, and they were not the first.
Bethany had the majority of her shift before her, and another tomorrow, and one the following day. She saw to the horizon, beyond the horizon, a life so mundane and painful that, at the age of seventeen, she spent most of her energy asking, Why bother? What evidence is there that things will get better? Why are people the way they are? There was once a voice that said, never give up, but that voice was a lie, from a liar - a stranger.
Through tears, Bethany retrieved her phone from the apron pouch. There was a notification for a new email. It was a response from the singing school. In the dark bathroom, Bethany sat in the phone’s glow and wondered if such a quick response was good or bad. Then she shook her head, opened the email and read it. Her tears stopped.
For a strange moment, Bethany smiled at the strip of light coming under the door. It was like the cafe, her life, was another world far away. Bethany wiped away the dried tears which had cracked on her cheeks as it all became so clear: what she had to do, and that she would do it tonight. Why wait?
“Unfortunately, you do not have the technical ability we require of our new students. We appreciate this is not the news you but…”
Through the door, the manager’s knock rang faint. The angry woman at the table disappeared along with Roger. They are all fake. They are all empty and fake. Bethany hunched and removed the apron over her head. She scrunched it into a ball. Her short life had been a battle. She had struggled, and for the endless struggle all she had to show was a pittance, some celery and other things, which she would leave to her mother to feed the pet rabbit and the chickens, and to say sorry.
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Profitron contains absurd, satirical and funny short fiction and prose. Literary influences include Pynchon, DeLillo, Vonnegut and Norm Macdonald. That’s all we have time for, folks.
Very well written . I hoped for a happy ending but I that’s the point of the story . ❤️