“In a post-COVID world, a naive & lonely nineteen-year-old waitress crosses paths with a middle-aged, misanthropic line-cook.”

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The following is dedicated to two special ladies – neither I introduced myself properly to, but from what I assumed formed the basis of the character of Cassidy; and to my wonderful wife, for whom if I ever were to leave, or her leave I, this story would stand as prognostication.

i

“Why won’t you talk to me?”

Arthur heard what she said, and the tremble behind it, “What did you say?”

“Why won’t you talk to me?”

“I don’t like people.” He intended that as a period and went back to work, but since he bothered to reply, it was an invitation.

“You can say ‘hi’.”

“Hi, huh?”

“Yeah. You know, saying hi probably takes less than a second. We have been here all night together.”

“Okay, thanks.” He went back to scrubbing the inside of one of the fryers.

It was after-hours one regular Saturday night in November. Arthur & Cassidy were scheduled the closing shift: they had both done it before, just not together yet. Cassidy saw it as an opportunity to get to know Arthur better, but, as was his norm now, all Arthur wanted to do was fight back his discomfort with stoicism, finish the job, and go home. He was bone-tired, and attacking a hard, crunchy bit of caked-on residue with a steel wool brush. He still had two more fryers to clean, and he had ten minutes until their scheduled shift ended at 10PM. These things were shit: no wonder management had to keep replacing them.

Cassidy had more-or-less finished everything in the dining room and was sweeping up in the vestibule, slowly and cautiously approaching the kitchen as she completed the spots before it. There were only the two of them left in the building, and she had the keys to lock up. Faintly, on the worn-out, twenty-year-old Phillips stereo that sat perched high on a shelf in the vestibule played the soft reverberations of Top-40 radio.

“…That’s it?”

“What else do you want me to say, Cassidy? I’m trying to scrub this shit off the fryer. I’m busy.”

“You know, just some soap and water would do the trick.”

“…Really?“

“Hey, if you want to stay here all night to win the war on dirt & grime, be my guest. But I’d like to go home at some point, and I’m all done, so…”

“Did you do the bathrooms yet?”

“Yes I did the bathrooms. I told you I was done. You don’t think I don’t want to go home, too?”

“You want to clean this too? Be my guest.” He rudely threw the brush down and stepped back, handing the reigns to her. She filled a red bucket with soapy water from the sink, took a rag, and wiped the spot. Even when hunched over, she still towered almost a foot above him. The crud began to break up, leaving the scratched surface from the wool brush underneath, “Okay, okay, okay, thank you so much.”

“See? You don’t have to be so rough with everything.”

“Listen, if you’re done, why don’t you go dust off the stereo speakers so I can actually hear something back here.”

“I would, if we had any dusters.”

“Then, I don’t know, go find the step-ladder and wipe off the little shelf it sits on. Oh wait, you don’t need that.”

“Har-dee-har-har.”

“I can be bratty, too.”

“Who’s being bratty?”

“You! You’re bratty. You’re a bratty girl.”

“…Is that some porn thing?” She was having fun with him, now.

“Whatever. Do whatever you want to do. That’s what you do anyway.”

“Excuse me?”

“Just leave me alone, okay?”

“No, what did you said?”

“I said you kids are going to do whatever it is you’re going to do anyway, so who gives a shit what I tell you, hm? You’re probably not even listening.”

“What’s this all about, Arthur?” It was the first time he had ever heard her say his name out-loud.

“Nothing!”

“You’re such a liar.”

“Fine, it’s you. You and all the other dumb White girls that get hired. Okay? You’re a bunch of entitled snowflakes who don’t know anything about putting in a real day’s work. Tell me I’m wrong! You all have your fucking hacks online to make shit easier for yourselves, while guys like me get shit on, even though I’m breaking my fucking back. It’s bullshit and I’m fucking sick of it.”

“Is that why you haven’t been talking to me? Because you think I’m a bad co-worker? Listen buddy, you don’t even know me. We’ve said more to each other tonight than we have in the whole three months we’ve been working together. You don’t say hi, you don’t look at me, you ignore me when I talk to you over the counter…”

[cont’d]

“When have you ever talked to me over the counter?”

“I have! On occasion, I’ve asked you about orders, and you never answer. One of the other guys speaks for you instead.”

“Well that’s probably better anyway, because soon you’ll be gone and you’ll forget all about this conversation and we can both go back to our lame, useless lives. Okay?”

“I can’t believe you think I don’t do anything around here. Why do you think they keep me on? Hm? You don’t know anything. You just run the fryers but you have no idea what goes on out on the floor. You think you’re busy? Try it out here one night with all the families, and the hipsters who don’t tip, and the seniors who can’t make up their mind and want to talk to you all night… and then carrying around all that bottomless food and drink, it’s crazy! My arms are like fucking weights! Do you have any idea how lucky you are to be doing the job you do, away from all that?” Arthur kept quiet, while Cassidy’s alabaster cheeks became visibly inflamed from discontent, “Forget it. If you think I’m good for nothing, then I’m just going to hang out in the office on my phone til you’re done. Have fun.”

“Fucking bitch.”

“Go fucking die, Arthur! Fucking loser! I hope you quit!” She slammed the office door behind her.

When Arthur was finished with the last fryer, fifteen minutes after he was supposed to have clocked out, he did a quick walkthrough of the kitchen to make sure everything else was good – plus a walkthrough of the dining room, which he didn’t trust Cassidy to have done properly, but that it appeared she did – and then he went to the office door. He wasn’t delaying it at all. Inside, he could hear the obnoxious, looping audio of Facebook reels.

He knocked. Before he could say anything, the audio was off, the door was open, and Cassidy stormed out toward the front entrance without making eye contact. She held the entrance door open as a physical cue for Arthur to ‘get the fuck out’, and he did. She turned off the lights, set the alarm, locked up behind her, and got into her SUV without saying a word to him, driving away as he walked toward his bus stop.

ii

The busses ran at a reduced frequency that late at night. If Arthur had chosen to walk home, it would have taken him well over an hour in the late-autumn chill, so he decided to wait the hour for the next ride at the exchange instead. That way he could sit on a bench, light a joint, and have time to think with hardly anyone else around.

He loved smoking weed. He loved how it mellowed him out, and how it enhanced whatever it was he was doing, whether that was watching a movie, playing a video game, or masturbating. He knew there was a health debate about vaping versus smoking, but he still enjoyed rolling his doobies by hand, and the gratification of putting that final twist to a smoke he saw through from beginning to end. He lit the tip, and the fumes flooded his middle-aged lungs. He coughed and coughed & coughed, until some stomach scum came up and he spat it out. That was some good shit.

On one hand, Arthur felt guilty. On the other, he didn’t care. This year had been one of choices, and it was his choice to shut everyone out at work, including Cassidy. But she was just trying to be nice, wasn’t she?

Arthur laughed out-loud. Heh. ‘Nice’. Young girls like that were selfish. They liked the attention. He could see it in every flirty interaction with the horny boys in the kitchen.

He could see it when she was slow-dancing with the broom to Ed Sheeran on the radio, earlier in the night. It was nine PM – less than an hour before their blow-up – and her hair was down: out of the bun Arthur was familiar with. She sang out-loud to Thinking Out Loud, even though her voice was at a murmur, and she tossed the handle back and forth between each hand like she was the one leading. How could someone let their hair grow out like that? Wasn’t it a nuisance? It was for the attention – always for the attention.

And she got it. As Arthur reminisced about her and their interaction that night, and the verisimilitude of ways it could have gone differently, he surmised that he may have been just a little too hard on her. ‘You can’t fix stupid.’ I mean, she was only a fragile teenager, right? She was hardly an adult. She was probably at home crying about it right now.

*

Cassidy was so hot from the encounter that she had to cool off before going home, or she was sure she’d be up all night thinking about it.

It was eleven when she reached the full-sized track at her old high school. She didn’t bring any shorts with her: she pulled her jeans down to her dry wick long-johns; pulled off her work shoes & socks and left them on the driver’s side mat; left her vehicle unlocked with the keys still in the ignition; and sprinted barefoot through the wet grass to the cheap rubberized track. She couldn’t remember the last time she ran for herself, but it was as if she had never given it up: in no time, she broke her high and decided to go the full six laps around, just like she did in PE.

Compared to every other class, PE was a relief, when she had it. In her last year of school, when she was finally coming back for in-person classes on a more regular basis, she had forgotten how boring it was to have to sit at her little desk, taking handwritten notes all day. Having the teacher send their pre-written ones out to the students over Zoom was way easier than having to take them herself: she couldn’t even read her own cursive.

Who cared about cursive anymore? School was boring. But PE wasn’t. She would look out the window of any of the sit-down portables during her regular classes, and she would see what green flared through, and she knew she wanted that to be her life. While no one necessarily “failed” PE, she was always one of the first at the end of those once-a-month loops, and therefore had the privilege of watching those who didn’t really care about their grade walk the rest of the way while she cooled off in the grass – until the teacher gave up on who was left, leaving them the still-ticking stopwatch to record their final time themselves while everyone else went inside. Now that she thought about it, she was probably the only one who did care. She was on her fourth lap now.

She knew she should have gotten over Travis sooner. She was glad she didn’t sell herself out, like the girls in the Facebook photo she saw: almost naked, showing everything off as if the boys did anything to deserve it. She couldn’t believe how important some of these other “children” she graduated with emphasized sex. She looked at Pornhub a couple of times – literally, twice – but nothing titillated her. The main page was always actresses faking that “ahegao” face from the Japanese comic books that looked stupid, or some other depraved act that was both demeaning and uncomfortable. She put all the energy she could have otherwise used to be a slut to concentrate on track. As a result, she didn’t have much of a sex drive, and when she did pleasure herself, it was incredibly discreet, incredibly quiet, and lately, while thinking of Travis. But that was high school: almost two full years prior. He didn’t seem interested in her anymore, and she didn’t just want to be someone’s fling, if she was lucky enough to find someone new who she liked that much again.

By the time her laps were over, she had stopped taking Arthur’s outburst personally. She was blushed red, but you couldn’t see it in the dark: just the way she liked it. Panting and physically fulfilled, she collapsed on the cold, damp ground. She rolled around like a contented animal, covering herself in the dew, before coming to a rest on her back. The night sky was clear.

iii

That December, there was a diabolical snowstorm: the first in a December for a while. The owners of the mall where the restaurant sat were cheap, and waited too long to have the parking lot plowed. After a couple of days of people driving through it, it was torn up and crap from the sleet. That meant staff and customers alike were forced to resort to the Wild West that was the street parking, plowed by the proud City of New Lusecolm.

Cassidy was, self-admittedly, bad at parallel parking, let alone a drive-through spot. This afternoon, looking out her family room window onto the snow covering the street, she considered calling in sick. It was her Monday, and she watched the snow fall over the last two days, drinking her mug of coffee while a “Love It Or List It Vancouver” marathon played in the background. It was her mother’s favourite, and ever since free-to-stream TV made its appearance, it was all she watched – even ones she had seen before. Cassidy was so capture-bonded she found herself also starting to get the hots for Jillian’s contractor Kenny.

Cassidy didn’t call in sick: she wanted out. She packed a change of clothes for her shift into her knapsack, put her snow boots on, shovelled around her car, and set off an hour early, giving herself plenty of extra time, though not enough for a second shower after all that work. Thank goodness her 4×4 could handle her speeding through the white.

Pulling up to the mall, she managed to find a great spot close to the restaurant. It just required parallel parking between two cars. Despite being as prepared for the day as she thought humanly possible, she forgot her weed pen at home and felt a tinge of anxiety about this car-planting ordeal: she pulled her RAV4 up to the spot and sight-measured – it looked like it would fit. But the street was worse off than the lot, and the curb was lined with build-up that stretched to where the traffic passed by. When she backed into the free spot, she lost traction and collided her rear bumper with the front of the car behind her.

Cassidy’s SUV thudded to a halt, and she flew forward and scraped the top of her head against the roof of her interior. She was fine – she checked her mirror: there wasn’t any blood. But her heart jumped. There was something far worse coming: after a minute, the driver’s door of the car she hit opened and Arthur got out, “What are you doing, Cassidy? I just bought this!”

“I’m sorry, it was icy.”

“No shit!”

“Chill out, Arthur. I’m sure it’s fine. It was just a bump,” Arthur just stared at her. Cassidy thought he was being weird again, when really he had nothing to say, “Are you okay?”

He took a hoot from a joint he had with him and flailed his arms and legs, “Nothing’s broken.” Cassidy snorted.

“Is that weed?”

“It is.”

“Gimme.” She walked toward him, her hand outstretched.

“No.”

“I was just in a car accident. I need it.”

“I don’t share with anyone after COVID, and I don’t have any extra.” He was lying about the extra, but he didn’t share, because he didn’t have anyone to share with anymore.

“Come on, Arthur! I left my pen at home.”

“Your pen?”

“My vape pen.”

“How did you get a vape pen? Aren’t you twelve?”

She gave him the ‘are you fucking kidding me’ look, “Is that supposed to be funny?”

“I guess.”

“Just hand me the joint, okay? I’ve had my vaccinations.”

“Pull forward first.”

“What?”

“Pull your car forward first. I want to look at the damage.” Cassidy grumbled and obliged. The car rolled back and forth over the snow patches as she eased on the gas, only to roll too far forward and almost collided with the car in front of her, too. She stopped just in time and backed up, making Arthur chuckle. When she got out and they looked together at the bumpers, they couldn’t see anything. He then obliged her the joint, which was down to a roach by that point.

“Thank you.” She smoked. After a couple of puffs, her fingers could feel the heat from the cherry & she tossed the roach into the snow and it fizzled out. As she blew the cloud out, she coughed, and he laughed at her again. She punched him playfully on the arm. She pointed at his ride, “So this is new, huh?”

“Yeah. Finally saved up enough,” It was a 2012 Honda Civic in Urban Titanium, “No more bus for me.”

“I’ve never had to take the bus.”

“No?”

“Never. Before I got the Toyota I just got rides or walked everywhere.”

“You should try it sometime.”

“No thanks. Wasn’t there just something on the news about a random attack on a bus?”

“Yeah, but that was in an ungentrified area.”

“I’ve heard that word before but I don’t know what it means.”

“Gentrification?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s when the old, white suits in-charge tear down a block of old apartments and evict everyone, and then they put up a bunch of new ones where yuppies can live instead.”

“Ah.”

“Yeah, but it’s all wood-frame low-rises, so it’s not like the old apartments are getting replaced by anything better – just newer. They’ll have the same longevity.”

“And then in fifty years they’ll be doing the same thing.”

“Exactly. Or we’ll all be living in floating cities by then, and everyone still on the ground will be considered lower-class citizens.”

“…Is that from a movie?”

“Not that I know, no.”

“That’s pretty inventive.”

“Well, I have lots of time on my own to think. At the fryers.”

“Yes. Speaking of, why don’t we start walking over there?”

“Yes we shall. Are we late?”

She checked her phone, “No, we still have a few minutes.” When they entered the restaurant together, it was just a matter of time before the boys in the kitchen hooted and hollered, patting Arthur on the back & congratulating him on his conquest. Arthur said nothing, and Cassidy just played it off for exactly what it was: “Oh, we just ran into one another in the lot.”

iv

Arthur looked in his private bathroom mirror – apart from the aged fittings, it was fit for one working individual, with a sink, a toilet, and a small shower stall in the corner – as the bass from his next-door neighbour in the adjacent basement studio rippled through the wall on his right side, shaking his reflection. It was the middle of the day so Arthur couldn’t say anything without looking like the asshole. Didn’t the people upstairs who owned the house hear it, too? Didn’t they care?

It was February: a year since his break-up. He examined the beard he had let grow out over the winter cold, and its salt & pepper-coloured hairs. He wondered how many of those hairs he had this time last year: they were popping up all across his chin, instead of just his soul-patch, which was flush since he turned thirty-five two years ago.

In his right hand, he wielded a small pair of hair trimming scissors. He couldn’t remember the last time he had trimmed the stubborn hairs around his face. The night before – while he was stoned on his pipe, slouched on the couch watching cat videos on YouTube – he picked his nose. He thought he had struck gold, but when he went to pull out his treasure, he had his thumb and index fingers full of wiry, coarse hairs from the corners of his navel that he had yanked out unintentionally. It didn’t hurt, but there were so many that he went back for seconds, to no avail.

Arthur leaned as close to the mirror as he could – with its muck layer of hardened projectile-acne, in higher definition the closer he leaned – grabbed a tuft of nose hair with the fingers on his left hand, and cut them off with his right. His scissor hand was steady but his reflection was shaking from the bass against the wall on which the mirror sat, and the edge of the blade clipped his navel, leaving a small, oozing scratch. He could hear the rhythmic drums & guitar, and the deep, guttural singing of the heavy metal music playing next-door. Arthur thought he read somewhere that heavy metal fans were actually nice people. He had never met the guy next door, but if, or when, he did, Arthur didn’t think he would have anything to say to him at all.

He still had a couple of hours before he had to catch the bus. Things at the restaurant had been fine. Things with Cassidy were fine. Fine, fine, fine, fine: he was thinking as if he were talking to his parents, trying to get them off the phone. He was thinking about Cassidy on an almost daily basis now. Not all of those thoughts were defiled: the two of them had a rapport. He wouldn’t back away from her anymore, and he made sure to say hello to her every time he saw her and make an effort, if only to be friendly.

But in the back of his mind, Arthur still had a plan, and he was a fool to deny that he hadn’t begun to fantasize about what she looked like in lighter, tighter, more revealing clothing, or lack thereof. And the thing about fantasy was he could minimize her breast size, and her height as well, as she appeared as tall as he did in his subconscious, with him initiating the first kiss instead of waiting for her to lean over.

Now that his nose hairs were cut, he decided to do the rest. He felt around his ears: outside the lobe, and in the cave beside the entrance to the canal – the ‘ear lobby’ – were some juicy patches. Arthur trimmed those, too, and, as with his nose, caught himself a few times with the scissors.

He recalled the old man he sat next to on the bus once – back when Arthur was still in high school, and took the bus every day to-and-fro. This guy must have been in his 80s, with long, white hairs clearly sprouting outward like a pathogen. They sat next to one another long enough that Arthur really had a chance to look at that old man’s ear hairs, and consider them. Arthur thought he still had a few years for that, but now, looking at himself cautiously holding the scissors, it was like he was staring back at himself from the past, considering that elderly man on the bus who was now the aging man in the mirror. Even the white hairs on his face were the same hollow colour.

Arthur had considered asking Cassidy for her phone number, but that was too intrusive. He didn’t want to be the creepy guy who texted her and pursued her with nefarious intention, like how the boys in the kitchen flocked around her when she was first hired. He did like her. He did want to hang out with her after work, and see if they got along when they weren’t stressed, or co-complainants in a car insurance lawsuit. But somehow, it was easier to ask her if she was ever free to do something after work one time than it was to get her number.

The homeowner upstairs had turned his music on now, too. Arthur’s next-door neighbour soon increased their volume and shortly after the owner followed suit. A battle-of-the-bands was being waged, and Arthur’s bathroom was the Maginot Line, with both noises coming together to form a cacophony of indecipherable nonsense from what Arthur could not escape, lest he wanted to sleep on the street. He put the scissors down, licked his index fingers, and ran them against the grain of his eyebrows. They stood on end, with some especially extended follicles greying at their tips. He picked the scissors back up and ran the blade along their edge.

*

Cassidy didn’t outright turn Arthur down. She hummed & hawed and told him that she had to “figure things out” first.

“Well, what’s there to figure out?” Nothing, really, she guessed. Nothing was right: she hadn’t been out in months, except to work, so even just to get asked was flattering enough – even if it was Arthur. But he was trying. She could see that. And he had a quick wit, which she liked. And he was cute, even if it was in an intense way. But it wasn’t about that.

He even offered to drive from the restaurant in his shiny old Civic, although that did mean she would have to take the bus to work for the first time. It was cheaper than an Uber, or a taxi, and certainly safer than she’d heard the back seats of taxis were on the news: sitting on a discarded needle, or the driver pulling over to pull his dick out. Yuck! She shuddered. Getting randomly stabbed seemed like first prize compared to getting raped in the back seat of a ride-share by the driver you hired. Then her mind went back to some of those disturbing videos she caught on Pornhub, of men pushing the women, holding their heads down by the soles of their bare, dirty feet, while the girls had to pretend they enjoyed it.

Cassidy exhaled. After helping her check the bus schedule, Cassidy’s mother assured her that everything would be fine, and that random attacks never happen when you think: that’s why they were random. Her mother was always so reassuring. Teri sensed the sarcasm, and left to get her purse. Cassidy never knew that her mother carried a bottle of pepper spray around with her. It kind of made her seem dangerous, like she had a secret life or something. She wasn’t that interested before in what her mother did at work – it seemed so boring and numbers-based – but now she was.

But her mother wasn’t a spy: she was just scared, too. And thankfully, she never had to use the spray before. Teri handed it to her daughter and told her it was as simple as the guy at Wal-Mart made it: aim and spray. But she should only use it if she had to, and an emergency was not necessarily an odd man, or woman, or person, staring at her. A look was not the same as a hand, or an inappropriate whisper. Cassidy took the advice to heart.

She had a shower, forced to duck below the water head that wasn’t measured for someone tall to grow into, before she left to wait for the fifty-two-window coupe to come get her in the mild afternoon sun. She was towing her knapsack with a change of clothes for after work, and the spray can tucked within the laundry near the bottom of the bag.

*

Arthur turned his head back and forth in his mirror to make sure his eyebrow hairs were parallel.

But he wasn’t finished yet. Under the poor, single-bulb lighting, Arthur stood naked in the shower without the water running, and the screen open, while he trimmed his public hair. He clipped his skin a few times, dripping blood on the bowl of the tub, but when he was done it felt cleaner than it had in months. He swept the hairs up from the dry basin with toilet paper. There was no guarantee Cassidy was going to see his dick, but he wanted to be prepared nonetheless.

Wait. No. He shouldn’t think like that. He trimmed it for himself, personally. It wasn’t for anyone else. It was for him, so he could enjoy his own touch. It sounded just as stupid a justification to him as it would on a page.

Click Here for Part Two!

//wd 10.2.24

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Headline photo generated using Jetpack AI.