Cheese

Cheese

Washing dishes is a rather quiet profession, although no one does it full-time. It’s hard to understand why people go through it. And however it worked, Darryl Sampson found himself in the diner that night, doing the very same remedial work. Clattering of dirty dishes in his mind and ears overtook all thought; not to mention the bossing of cook Jones, waiter Stacy and the grey, hot machines emitting the delicious smell of heart attacks on buns.
They had few customers that night; more than usual. Not many strangers came by on this Kentucky Highway; although more than most. But logical relativity did not concearn Darryl. He couldn’t hear himself think, much less about the road or the state or the nation. But through the cloud of apathy came the sudden piercing, continued frustration of the not-so-lovely Stacy.
“SOMEONE GET MORE GOD-DAMN CHEESE!” Was the message she finally got through to everyone.
Darryl, not feeling too obliged to do so, replied lethargically,
“Get Joe, he aint doin’ much.”
“Fine...” Joe replied with equal enthusiasm. The thin boy pressed on his knees to rise from his blueberry crate (they wouldn’t need it until morning” and lumbered slowly to the freezer door, almost standing still compared to the hustle and bustle around him and his grumbling almost mute with the irritated cawing of his colleagues. Until he sleepily stepped into the gaping gray portal. Probably the coldest thing in the kitchen was this very door, rather than its contents. And so, Joe had went to fetch the bacteria-terraformed cow excrement.
Meanwhile, the chaos (that was really beyond our protagonist) that ensued the slightest change in vague routine continued as always. The customers, however rowdy Stacy made them out to be, were the calmest of the inhabitants of the small eatery, save a few slightly impatient men-of-the-country fellows seated by the gumball machine. Worst case scenario is that someone raises their voice and gets a little hungry. Perhaps.
And Darryl washed and washed; he washed slowly and callously. No one really knew why the staff were performing so below par that warm summer night. Maybe people just blamed each other and didn’t concentrate on their work. Most likely just the combined forces of everyone’s “one of those days” at once. Speaking of conflict...
“WHERE ON EARTH IS THE CHEESE!? THESE ORDERS ARE PILING UP!” when in reality the last customer came in through the door about 10 minutes ago and everyone’s meals were pretty much ready save the cheese. Somehow, young Mr. Sampson felt obliged to answer.
“Janet, get to it.”
“Why me!?”
“I have dirty dishes, Jones has food to cook, Sam has grease to fry, but no one’s spilled their coke on the floor for you yet.”
“...hmph.” And that was the end of that thrilling debate. Janet had deliberately attempted to disagree of course; everyone was grumpy in one way or another. She stormed to the aide of Joe, who she suspected had fallen asleep on the patties again. You have to give her credit for the enthusiasm she showed relative to her predecessor. The icy dawn-grey slab of steel sqeaked once, and snapped closed behind her as she set her wrinkled foot onto the blue tiles. Darryl was slowly being woken from his trance of monotonous work, and was more aware now due to the slow transfer of responsibility that seemed to be taking place on a subconcious level. And as he was crawlingly shaken awake, he noticed that just before the door closed, it made an unusual noise. A noise that instantly came to mind as black... something that a black thing would make. Darryl thought this, not really sure why he came to a color rather than a sound. The sound itself was a deep-throated, descending little harmony. Very bass, he thought.
He muttered aloud that it’s not as if he had to worry. If he had the time to focus on small sounds when doors closed he certainly had the time to run if things got weird. Unfortunately, this specific thought surprised him. He suddenly emerged from his slouch, and started suspiciously looking around. Why did his first thought be that he would have to run? No one else seemed alarmed at all. The men-of-the-country in the back even calmed down. Unnerved, he resumed his work from the rabid bark of his supposed superior.
His dishes were depleting; contrary to the number of orders. Even though things were settling in, the kitchen’s problems refused to end. Everyone seemed in a hurry to do nothing. Stacy above all was enraged at the apparent incompetence of her apparent underlings.
“NO ONE HAS ANY CHEESE YET! CAN SOMEONE PLEASE WORK ON THAT!? JESUS!” She showed no signs of cooling off and no one showed any signs of helping. “SAM! GET IN THE FREEZER!” Sam was nonplussed.
“Think. I can’t just stop in the middle of baking this cra-”
“I DON’T GIVE A HOOT.” And it was true; no hoots were given. Sam had differing, more sarcastic opinions.”
“Fine. I’ll just stop in the middle of it, when the deep fat isn’t even sitting, and the whole kitchen is gonna flood with cholestorol. It’ll be your fault too. Get a head and-
“DO WHAT I TELL YOU.”
“Okay! Okay! Fine! Just don’t blame me for-”
“NOW, SONNY.” Sam gave a scowl and scorn from his built face. Proceeding to the freezer at average pace, he turned back and growled,
“Don’t bother with-” but he was interrupted by a sound. A black sound. There was silence among the four workers remaining in the kitchen. Stacy, rather unsurprisingly, was oblivious to the hold-up and encouraged,
“Go! What are you waiting for, a hug?”
“What was that sou-”
“You should be well aware how much I care about what you have to say by now, mister.”
“...” He glanced the walls and the door. He began to sweat.
“Go! Go! We’re not getting any younger!” And that was the breaking point for him. He closed his eyes, clenched his fists and tightened his neck. Without opening his eyes, he opened the door quickly and slammed it behind him. Blackness oozed through the air in sound as it shut. Darryl for one shuddered awfully. The kitchen had sunk to silence.
Darryl shuffled his feet nervously. His legs ached terribly and itched to move...to run. He needed to run. He needed to. Perking up suddenly, he fanned his cold sweat away with his paper hat and desperately reasoned with himself not to pick up and run straight out the door. “Where would I run?” he thought to himself, “twenty miles to the nearest town? But I would probably not think about where I was running and focus more on what I was running from...wait, how did I think I would be running from something? Why is that the...first, er...” Significantly unnerved now, he polished off his last few dishes rather quickly and sloppily.
Feeling rather sick from this whole affair, Darryl sat down on Jones’ blueberry crate uncomfortably. He felt lightheaded and dizzy (which at least deterred him from running) and had no intention of thinking straight any time soon. He had the feeling a person would get when they had to run away from something they haven’t identified as existing, while simultaneously vomiting and fainting (which sounds just as problematic as it would be).
And over again he looked at the door which had apparently swallowed up half the staff. He stared at it and felt the warmth of the splintery wood beneath him that lingered from when Joe was sitting on it a mere twenty minutes ago. He wondered what had happened to them seriously for the first time. In all likelyhood it was an elaborate prank. But the smell... the reactions from the silent Jones and the passive-aggressive Sam seemed too real to have been acted upon. But then, he guessed, that would just mean they were good at it.
It was probably only five minutes of tortured hypothetical sickness for Darryl, before the ever-charming Stacy was obliged to yell, “Well I don’t care what’s going on here, all I know is that someone needs to get some CHEESE!” Jones, who had held his tongue to this point, said boldly,
“Me.” However, Darryl found something utterly wrong with the fact that Jones was going into the freezer to obtain the cheese (a task no one had yet done successfully).
“No...no I’ll go in.” Young Mr. Sampson replied. His current ailment only went further past the threshold of pain. Blackness seemed to be everywhere; he heard, very quietly, the black sound of the door as he approached it. The volume of said noise only grew as the distance between him and the door decreased. Teetering on delirium, he still marched forward zombie-like. His other senses began being assaulted; he smelled black odors, tasted fowl black tastes, felt black crawling on his skin, even black clouds circled his vision. He had no idea why he kept going while these hairy, fowl, black THINGS continued to advance on him (even though they appeared to already be on him, he preferred not to think about that).
Suddenly he stood there, not three feet from the wretched beast of the freezer door that had devoured the staff. His mind went blank...he ran away. The entire world became black, he could only see the white outlines of things, his skin was filthy with THEM, whoever THEY were. The black things. He reeked of opaqueness somehow, and he had no idea why. He stumbled hurriedly toward the door, disregarding all notions of “walking”, and was more in a trance of “must move to door” rather than “must run to door”. Like a puppet of black masters he flailed wildly, somehow putting his feet one in front of the other toward the door.
Jones and Stacy were not to be heard to Darryl; in fact no living being seemed to join him on this horrible journey through the night. But he stumbled once too much, and slammed his face directly into the glass door, opening slightly and letting in a cool breeze across the unconcious face lying partially on plaster, partially on concrete.

Without a clue to how long he had been sleeping, and even less why no one had assisted him, he got to his feet as if he had just slipped on Janet’s sloppy mop trail. And he very well could’ve. It wasn’t exactly common practice to him to defy the messages sent to him by his brain, but he could not register why on earth some evil black...stuff...was hiding in the freezer.
One of many things he noticed was that the full staff of the fully-staffed resturaunt was now gone. Not to mention all of the customers. He was alone. He was too tired to be afraid right now; he might do it later. Stepping over behind the counter and to the freezer door in a haze (although not a violent one as he had just experienced), he opened the door and looked inside. He felt no suspense, no drama, just the information that there was nothing here.
So he stepped across the freezing plaster floor, picks up a box of cheese, and walks out. No thoughts of fear, just working as he always had. Sure, he was shaken by the fact that there was a strange man in a black coat who had not been there when he had entered the freezer, but if reality were breaking down, he didn’t care anymore. Setting down the crate next to the counter and walking over to the man was his only incentive.
“Good evening, sir. Would you like anything to eat?”
“...yes please. Just a small cheese fries tonight.” The fact that he had spoken-- and with a human voice-- was indeed a little startling, and he did seem to be recovering from whatever sort of shock he had been in. Enough to notice that the man’s face was black-bearded and aged, with hints of being slightly ragged. But he seemed kindly enough.
“Of course sir. It’ll be about five minutes.”
The fact had really started to grip Darryl that he had no idea what was going on. He sweated, gradually more and more.
He stabilized the deep-fat fryers that were almost overflowing, and the heat reflected on to his face. Only with the heat did he realize the unholy coldness in the room. Darryl wasn’t particularly sure if it was him or the room, but just thanked god that he wasn’t delirious. Then again that WAS a possibility, he thought as he opened the crate of cheese, cut off a slice and put it on the counter. He WAS serving cheese fries to a poltergeist.
The sound of his knife slicing through the innocent potatoes reverberated strangely throughout the room. Darryl took note of the echo in the room. If he was a ghost, he wasn’t manipulating sound. He laughed at himself suddenly. It seemed he was going through his old movie cliches for information about ghosts. In general, he wasn’t a believer, but then again...who was that person?
Placing a net in the fryer and tossing the potato strips in, he called out, “Skins or no skins?” with a vague curiosity for more interaction with this being.
“Leave ‘em on.” he (?) dismissed casually. Darryl took the sufficiently fried slices, and put them in a paper dish from the stack to his right. As he did this, he noticed the man’s gaze was wandering. He wasn’t taking any special interest in him, it was as if he was just a normal customer, and Darryl was a normal customer. He layed the cheese on it, picked up the hot bowl, and humbly walked to the man’s table in the dead center of the room.
“Here you go, sir”, Darryl chimed, placing the plate on the table.
“Thank you.” Mr. Black (as Darryl had begun calling him in his mind) said in his slightly-gruff, deep voice. Darryl payed special attention to the movement of his arm under his black coat, and as he watched, Black moved his beefy hand to the plate, plucked one crisp off the side with two fingers, and moved it to his mouth, and ate half of it in one bite. He chewed it slowly. Darryl, who didn’t mind waiting, wondered if he was savoring it, or if that’s just as fast as he chewed. After a strangely long time, Black audibly swallowed the piece and turned to him.
“Well sonny, my sincere thanks.” he remarked, “Just like mom used to make. You’re certainly a nicer young man than that skinny kid, the moody woman and the arguable chap.”
Darryl was slightly astonished. What had they done, and where were they now? Mr. Black was acting as if to get up. “You’ve really made me see the good in humble little places like this, considering the circumstances. You should go ahead and put the cheese back in the freezer, though, you don’t want it to melt.”
Darryl wasn’t concerned with the issue in his mind about if cheese melted, however. Instead, he just followed the man’s instructions and picked the medium-sized crate up with his semi-strong arms, cleared the door with his back, and set it down almost too gently. And as he expected, when he walked out the door, the hustle and bustle of a kitchen on a rush schedule had returned, much to his discontent. Or maybe his relief?