At Your Service Kids eat free today, so let’s count our blessings. A mantra that I hum to the clacking of my shoes every time I turn the corner. Serving is easy. You simply put on a show and make everyone forget about their miserable lives. My job is to give you a fine dining experience. The one where you cackle at my playful banter and leave nothing but cookie crumbles on the booth, a token of your humble gratitude. I mop the floors every night and see the reflection of traveling customers who stopped by, waiting for summer traffic to cool off. Yes, there I stand like a jack-in-the-box, where children twist the handle and I become a pop-up monster, hidden inside the small cavity of the wooden box. A theatrical production where servers stash the day’s earnings in dirty aprons, where we scurry backstage in the wings of the kitchen, yelling because the cooks forgot the appetizers for table sixty-two. Where stress brews like a tornado on a Sunday evening. We take cover underneath tables of plaguing anxiety that’s been tattooed from sleeve to sleeve as this world turns unnecessary wants into needs. Confusing requests hit a nerve at full speed, like how the gentleman preferred only the patty and the bun for his Old Timer with cheese. I write poems on the back of printed receipts that sleep inside the checkholder of unfulfilled dreams, draining my body of the fourteen hours that I bleed. I serve you all systematically like a cyborg with a broken heart, programmed to see satisfaction yet feel nothing once you leave.
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Danielle Nogales is a student at Christopher Newport University majoring in English with a concentration in writing.
