Feed the Bitch nosleep

In rooms like this, you can’t be afraid of blood. There are knives, a lot of them. There is the scream of seared flesh, the shouting of profanity the likes of which most people would never imagine.

The smells blend together into a strange mixture you can’t pinpoint, but don’t want to anyway.

The longer you stay in these rooms, the less you notice any of it, the more it just becomes the norm.

You keep your head down, do your work, stop asking stupid questions. And when you are the new guy and someone yells at you to “feed the bitch!”, no matter how long you've been doing this, you go and feed the bitch.

I hate feeding the bitch. It’s a pain in the ass and I have no patience for this sort of thing. It’s a long game, that takes too much concentration, too much attention to detail. I’m more of a wham-bam sorta guy. I don’t have that artist touch for this.

But still. If I don’t feed the bitch, no one will. That’s the point, it turns into a pissing match. If I don’t feed the bitch and she dies, then it’s going to fall on me and the boss will blame me. That’s how it works. I should appreciate that it takes a certain level of trust to be asked to take care of the bitch in the first place, but fuck all that. She’s heavy.

There should be two guys hauling her out of the closest and lugging her doughy-ass onto the table. But no, it’s just me.

Suddenly the place is empty, like I’m the only one who could possibly take care of this. I’m sweating by the time I lift the hundred plus pounds of shifting weight onto the long metal table. I have to slap at her to keep her from rolling off and I leave handprints all over her for the effort.

God she fucking stinks. Feeding into that bulk the messy, sloshing mixture of flour, water and yeast just to make sure it doesn’t die is a time consuming process.

Did I mention how much it stinks?

I don’t know how pastry chef’s do this. Sourdough starter might be the worst fucking smell in the kitchen. That’s probably why they call it the bitch, beyond from that cooking book. That’s how kitchens work, they gloom onto those terms. Like way back when Emeril had that TV show. Depending on the kitchen you either loved or hated that guy. Most people loved Bourdain, assuming they weren’t jealous. Probably why our bread guy calls it the bitch.

I know that’s why I call it the bitch.

By the time I get the fucking thing fed, then muscle it back into the massive fucking bin to sit and rise and stink even more, I’m sweating like a fucking pig. The damn thing is too big to put it back into dry storage since we call all those 10-cans we’re never gonna go through, so I lug it to the closet near the dish room and go back to my station.

The two other line cooks are holding it down well enough as the dinner rush starts to build, but we’re low on Bolognese, so I go over to the walk-in and take a second to enjoy the blast of cold air from the fridge.

The fucking prep cook never puts anything in the same place twice, so I have to dig around for the right Cambro.

It isn’t until I take the effort to take the body down from the hook, the sheen of the plastic wrap glossy against whatever tears she had left inside of her, almost as hard to hold onto as the bitch, that I find the meat sauce hidden back in the corner. I let the body drop into the corner when I hear my boss yell over my shoulder, “What the fuck?!”

My head snaps to the side, cold sweat against my head as I stand under the refrigerator fan. “What?”

“I thought I told you to feed the bitch!”

“I did,” I say, “She just didn’t fit in the pantry anymore, I moved her to the closet by the sud-buster.”

“Oh,” he says, the anger on his face melting away as his eyes shift down to the body of the woman in the corner. “She dead yet?”

I sigh and put the Bolognese back on the shelf as I drop down to my haunches, my knees starting to creak and I feel that much older for it. I look at her eyes and see them shift toward me, then away, like a broken dog.

“Nah,” I say, “Not yet.”

“For fuck’s sake...well, hang her back up, they just sat a 20-top.”

I swear under my breath and get to work hanging the near limp body back into the meat hook. There’s less blood pooling on the ground today. I shouldn’t have to deal with her much longer.

If people only understood the effort we actually put forward to get their food ready. Takes a lot of blood, sweat and tears. Mostly blood.

Submitted March 10, 2017 at 07:37PM by chokingmn http://ift.tt/2mrcGAZ nosleep