It is an incorporeal time of day, hour eighteen of open eyes. Their aprons are smeared with fingerprinted berry-red, which looks like butcher shop blood underneath the crooked fluorescent lights. It’s quiet besides the sharp whine of the bread oven; without a softer background noise, that huge machine resembles factory terror in audio. They try not to think of ibuprofen for their headaches, nor the rainy drive home which never seems to draw closer, those late-night strobing yellow traffic lights bearing through the sockets of their eyes. Caked-on sweat and sugar make their faces taste like trail mix. They keep their heads down, good little mice, dual-wielding dipping donuts for the frosting vat before them. Again. Again. The hour hand shocks counterclockwise. The oven sobs again. They are swaddled in a horror a time warp of humid night pressing with a father’s might upon their shoulders; an unreachable door; a jungle of fried spheres, the fruit of rectangular metal trees.
They are astounded by hubris, gossiping quietly in the forever night. Inadequate materials, all flavors of incompetency, paychecks that extinguish deeper hopes – anything at all to be said, for there is ample time for every nothing. They threaten leaving; neither will. They have one oar each in this second-shift canoe; surrendering one risks a capsize. And if one drowns, the newly-lonely misery would make dessert of the remaining.
