Sulfur & Tealights

Concept of Pain

After the elation of the early afternoon, work felt like a grim sentence. Customers came and went, some familiar and many new, with a few overwhelming surges in number. Like usual, the restaurant was just enough understaffed to save corporate the maximum amount of money without utterly sacrificing their workforce. The manager, a thickset woman of 5'4" with dark purple hair whose black roots were growing out, left through the back door for her evening smoke at ten, leaving her workers to accommodate a sudden burst of activity.

Mel grimaced as a drop of hot oil splattered across the back of her hand. Someone misplaced the fryer gloves again and she hadn't been able to find them. The disposable polyethylene gloves, which Cora had made employees wear while frying before the recently acquired fryer gloves arrived, were out. Mel feared they would have stuck to her skin if she'd worn them. She looked around, saw everyone was terribly occupied, and continued frying for the next few minutes until the manager returned.

"Ah, Cora!" she yelled to be heard over the din.

At first, the manager didn't respond, but after a few more calls she finally came over.

"What do need, Gnome?" she asked sharply.

"Can you take the fryer while I rinse my burn?" 

Mel always tried to stay polite, and had never asked Cora to do anything for her. The initial pain in Mel's hand had turned into a pressure, which was not good.

"Show me." Cora glanced at her hand and scoffed, "I'll get you some ketchup. Keep working."

Mel flinched at the idea. Before she could respond, Cora swiftly walked away. Her angry voice reached her from the front of the restaurant. Mel tried not to look at her hand as she worked.

A while later, after the pain completely subsided to Mel's chagrin, Cora returned in a huff and ordered her out to the cashier.

"Can I rinse my hand?" Mel asked desperately.

"No! Do you see how many people are out there?" She raised her hands in exasperation. "Of course, you don't! You're challenged! Go, and don't wimp out like the other gremlin."

Cora seemed to have an agenda against people shorter than her, despite her own unimpressive height. No one really understood why, but most of her employees needed their job and endured her harassment with grace, or some semblance of it.

Mel hurried to the cash register to find a long line impatiently waiting for someone to take their order. A few at the back walked out as soon as they saw her. She put on her best customer service smile and soon discovered the register wasn't calculating correctly. The young man in front of the counter, whose messy mop of hair hung in his face as he slouched, stared at her with baggy eyes while she did the math herself, then told him the price.

"Are you sure?" he asked.

She added the numbers again. In her semi-frantic state, miscalculation was possible, even if she was certain at that moment she was correct.

"Did you come up with something different?" turned out to be the wrong response, as the man looked down at her disapprovingly.

"Um, am I the cashier? Tsk. I'm out."

The next few customers were decent, albeit understandably frustrated at their wait time. When things finally started to slow down, Mel felt like she was going out of her mind from trying to stay upbeat, add together multiple orders (and sometimes subtract for coupons), and hide her burn through a haze of anxiety. She could only hope no one thought she had tried to steal their money if she accidentally charged too much. Laura gave her a pat on the shoulder as she went to clean a soda spill near the soft drink dispenser. Mel checked her phone for the time and was disappointed to find she still had at least two hours of her shift left.