VIRAL

DURING

I am the black muck on the floor, eye level with his boots. Fried chicken turds are encrusted in the leather where the shoes are starting to wear near the toe. I have a horrible tingling sensation in my gut, like maybe I want him to catch me here, crouched on the floor with my skirt around my waist, my GoCam exposed in my hands. Maybe he'd understand what I'm doing back here or maybe he'd turn around and walk away. Maybe he'd grab me and throw me against the dry goods cabinet and suck my lips off, then scoop me up and carry me home, King Kong style. I could record that. I have a pretty good script of it in my head already. We could act it out. Right here behind the bread racks or in the closet behind me. It would be the only thing worth the wasted space on my SD card at this point. He takes another step closer, just a couple of feet from me. My breath catches. He thinks he sees something? I hold my exhalation, my heart thumping against my throat. Can he hear it? Can he smell me?

"Lucky, get off my clock!" Joe bellows from the bowels of the restaurant. Lucky steps back, teeters, finally turns and leaves me there alone. I wait twenty seconds before standing, making sure the coast is clear. There can't be many of them left. I'll have to wait here until the last one leaves, until I'm alone with myself and the nothingness of what I've done. I finger the crumpled stickie note that holds the alarm code in the front pocket of my apron.

Someone cuts the musak at the front of the house and I'm left with just the dull hum of the walk-in coolers all around me. I smell what was fresh bread this morning souring with bacteria. We'll serve it anyway. That's something I could have captured in the eight hours since I planted my GoCam—molding bread going out to unsuspecting guests. The Boston Globe would have jumped on that story. When this chick in Miami, Marni Reyes, stuck a camera in the prep kitchen at the Assisted Living Facility where she worked, she captured cooks dumping sleeping pills into the mash potatoes and serving them up to the kiddies to get them to stop banging their heads against the walls. She shot that. It went viral and the bastards were arrested.

But I will have to do this shit again tomorrow. I'll have to risk it again, sneak in early, rig the camera, maybe even manifest something; a little white lie, reality television style. Maybe drop the steak for table 27 on the floor on purpose and see how fast Joe snatches it out of the chemical jelly we walk through every day before sending it back out to the guests. That would do it. And it would only be a little set up on my part, not a lie really. A little produced reality never hurt anyone, until it does. But this is something Joe does every day, scraping fallen food off the floor and dumping it back on a plate. Except today. No one did anything revolting or that would violate health codes today.

If I could direct these bozos, I would, just like I used to, but I can't.

I duck down fast as a couple of cooks leave. I hear the front door slam. I check my camera and see that I've got about an hour left at 720p with 60 frames per second. When I stand again I feel a loose shard from one of the metal bread racks slowly dig into my flesh, tearing through the thick black tights I popped out of a plastic egg this morning. The new run dominoes up my thigh and gets lost under my regulation black skirt. I bite back a yelp as the blood drools down my leg, but as I move to adjust for pain, the sound my thighs make when I drag my no-slip shoes through the crap on the floor, is something like pfft, pfft, pfft and seems louder than my outburst of pain would have been. I wonder if the mic picked up my burning thighs or my insane heartbeat or the voices in my head screaming at me to get the hell out of here and stop trying to shoot for glory, stop trying to make something of myself. Just be here now and accept my fate. I am no longer a story producer. I am no longer anything, but a waitress. I am no longer a resident of New York or Los Angeles, but sometimes I go there in my head.

Margie leaves next and I dive for cover again. She pulls on her coat and comes right at me. I tuck my face into my knees as she looks back over her shoulder and says, "I'm out!" She waits for a response, but gets none. "Don't give the new girl a hard time, guys. She's never closed before," she says to no one in particular. I train my camera on her and find a moment of hesitation in her eyes, a maybe I should stay look that subsides quickly when she remembers that LaDasha's been with the babysitter for seven hours now. At this point, Margie just worked for free. There's no money left, not even for a pack of smokes, only one-way fare back to Watertown and cash in hand to the sitter.