miserable derelicts
Prompt from HaveHasHad:
Hell’s Fiction
Give me your undercooked, give me your rubbery, give me your falling apart, give me your abominations.
Most of all, give me prose that’s fucking raw!
Name of the game is Hell’s Fiction but you can submit any old thing – fiction, CNF, poetry, I-don’t-know-whats. Just write it like it’s about to fumble dinner service and cry in the walk-in fridge.
Max word count 500. Shorties + poems can sub up to 3, totalling 500 words.
Subs are capped at 150.
Can’t wait to see who ate.
I awake in a flash of sweat and heat. The dream that’d had its grip on me slipping away as fast as it came, leaving behind its foggy, heavy feeling. Immediately I feel the remnants of the bottle of grenache I’d sipped like juice the night before, fruity and acidic and lethal. Can feel every crevice of my brain crying out, sucked dry and left deserted.
I fling my blankets off. Reach for my phone, palms slick, and see the time: 1:28pm. Fuck. I slide off the damp sheets, crank the ceiling fan to high. Stand underneath chugging warm water from the nearest half full glass until I can feel my bangs lifting off my slippery forehead.
The ice-cold water on my back is an oasis, jolting me out of my groggy state – though the alertness will only last for the remainder of the shower. The minute I step back out I begin to melt, tugging a comb through the permanent knots in my hair – no time to condition, and no point when the salty ocean water is my only grace after every shift. I am already looking forward to my nightly swim, avoiding the thought of the 8 hours that stand between then and now.
I pull on my work clothes before I am fully dry, water and sweat already mixing at my lower back. My underwear sticks to me like papier mâché, and my thighs rub raw between faded denim shorts. The socks I wore yesterday are still wet, my Vans covering the smell as soon as I squish my feet into them.
I’ll be fully drenched under my arms again by the time I park my bike behind the brewery, my only saving grace being the black of our t-shirts. The black that signals we are the staff - that we are the ones who sweep up broken glass and scoop leftover aioli out of ramekins. We are the sweaty-necked twenty-somethings who sit on milk crates next to dumpsters eating cold pizza from the mistake table. Our knuckles are cracked, our pores are clogged, and our beer bellies jut out under our aprons. We are miserable derelicts, and we know you all regard us with fear and awe - that you all crave our favour. That a tilt of an eyebrow is enough to get a table of 40-somethings in an uproar. We know our power, and we wield it with grace and visceral intention.
I tie on my apron and wash my hands. I look into my own eyes in the plate sized mirror at the sink. The bell dings and my nervous system, trained like Pavlov’s dog, sends a signal through my veins. The sweat on my arms glistens in the sun coming through the floor length windows. I check the time: 1:58pm. The ocean, 20 metres from our patio, crashes and calls like the spray from the dishy’s rinse nozzle against dirty pans. Eight hours, two minutes to go.
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Inspired by my time as a server/bartender in Busselton, Western Australia. A summer that was salty, sweaty and sweet.
