by Chris McGinty
The world was letters for a small time, like the letters from a small child’s toys or the magnets that held your important reminders, and bills to pay, to the fridge. The letters seemed to spell out a day and I would gladly pay you then were you to find in your heart and the refrigerator to feed me now. The yellow, the red, the blue and once again the red. Then just a hint of blue. You could cook me a burger, or if you’re not feeling up to it, we could order pizza instead.
Paul had a sauced pizza before him, but the sauce mixture made it look more like a pumpkin pie to the passerby. It was the wrong season for it and the winter weather was harsher. The pizza would warm the body and the stomach. Comfort food, often thought of in derogatory terms, was truly apt in this moment. He sprinkled the cheese on it. He would not know who the pizza was going to, perhaps he would in abstract terms, but he didn’t truly know.
Across the store, in the back, Carl was washing the catch tray pan. He was as much a cog in this machine as all of them, as they would continue to be. He scrubbed and rinsed, rinse and repeat. Pete and Repeat were making pizza… He dreamed of the time when we could sit at his laptop and write. He visualized it as though it was true. He wouldn’t want to risk not following through, but in his vision the typing didn’t seem right. It seemed to be random and for show, so he visualized again, this time feeling better about how he saw his future.
But then he thought of past times. He remembered being on the phone. He remembered the woman. Had it really been so long? She seemed faceless now. He would speak to her from his home when he should have been writing, and she the businesswoman, she would be on lunch break sitting in the city, that dark green cup in her hand, the dark coffee she drank. She was more of a tea drinker than coffee, but it was always coffee at work. He was always on speaker when they spoke so that she could continue to work. Her business attire fluttered in the wind. He could see her as though she was there.
And while he wasted another minute of his life remembering her, so many minutes wasted over the years, he knew that there were other writers. They were not stuck at their pizza job. They weren’t distracted by a lost friendship. They were writing, they were posting blogs, a hundred thousand between them, even more.
And yet, he didn’t envy some of these writers. Their jobs were corporate nightmares, just as his own job, washing these dishes was a corporate nightmare. Yet, he had no meetings in suits. No collating paper. He washed and washed. He never truly knew how many pizzas Paul had to make that day. The order was for a homeless shelter and a pleasant black woman showed up to get the pizzas, dozens of pizzas, which she loaded in her van.
At the shelter, she opened the back of the van, the pizzas in three stacks to the roof, and one of the male volunteers helped to carry the food in. He wore a brown suit jacket, and he was also a cog in the machine, but a very different machine. It wasn’t so corporate, but there were women who were employed somewhere and the sat in offices and they sat at laptops, and they made sure it was all written off for charity. It would never matter, but she wrote a note to herself that day. It simply read, “Today 7am Great.” And she was great. It meant nothing to the likes of Paul or Carl. It meant nothing to the women who managed the charity, nor the volunteer who helped her carry the pizzas in. It meant something to her though. It meant the world.