by Sam Moe
(Content warnings: Mentions of blood, sexual violence, emotional abuse, mentions of food/disordered eating)
Temperature
A small burning fire at the center of your core. Nights spent sobbing in the walk-in freezers. Chilly wine-key, blue frost growing on boxes of wine glasses. Beer stashed behind buckets of sauce. Sticky blue tape, peeling from heat. Burns on the backs of your hands. The man who requested you sauté his clam chowder until its temperature peeled the flesh off the inside of his mouth, you boiled the spoon, he still claimed it wasn’t hot enough but it would do. The woman who drank sugar-rimmed margaritas and requested her steak tips to be burned to a crisp with the crème brûlée torch. You don’t know how to tell this story without taking yourself out of it, so take yourself out of it.
Searing
Meaning, making a thin crust on the outer layer of a meal. Philadelphia-style ribeye, pan-seared scallops, filet mignon with compound butter and shoestring potatoes. Seared slices of salmon as orange as the sun, pork chops coated in hot oil, brined with sugar and salt, you used to watch him flipping pieces of meat over on the grill and thought to yourself, please let the evening have mercy on me.
For the first few years, you were strangers. You started as a hostess, then moved your way up messily to a busser and a food runner, making friends with the waitresses and enemies with the bartenders. You broke every dish it was possible to break. The other busser would follow you down the hall, your arms heavy with plates, and unclasp your bra. A server, whom you told
multiple times you didn’t want to sleep with, gropes you after work. When you complain, they tell you it’s just another Saturday night, what did you expect.
When you finally became a waitress, almost a decade later, the decision is made for you by one of several rotating managers. The two of you are friends for a while, but quickly she starts to favor the other waitresses. They come in hungover, smudged eyeliner and aviator glasses, each responsible for their party of fourteen, making almost two hundred dollars if they manage upsell multiple courses. You watch with frustration as they carry chillers and bottles of white wine, pouring to the label, always slowly, free of fizz.
The first day you arrived wearing a server uniform, he made fun of you. The attention was worse when you trained behind the bar, a single window filled with upside-down hanging wine glasses separating you from the kitchen.
At first, you didn’t have confidence. Nights were spent pouring over recipes, trying to memorize lists of words: au jus, béarnaise, compound butter, brine, macerate, compote. You taped lists of all the alcohol the restaurant sold to the flaps of your server notebook, convinced with a little effort the guests would forgive your awkward personality and fumbling hands. You tipped over martini glasses and broke large oval plates in half, but at least the food had already been eaten. In a few months, you would become an expert, you would have all the manager’s ears, special treatment and responsibilities you never asked for. Once, when your manager isolated you in the same section of tables for over a month, the chef forged a letter and handed it to you in the second walk-in freezer, also known as his “meeting room.”
What is this? you asked.
Open it in the parking lot. Only send it if you get desperate.
The letter is still sitting on your shelf, acting as a book mark.
Reduction
- Let your mood evaporate in the back. Don’t cry until after you’ve delivered all
dishes, clockwise from the first person whose back is to the door , to your table - Leave behind the syrup
- Reduce yourself to 1⁄2 the person you used to be
- Don’t become bitter
- Serve the demi-glace with the filet mignon
There were outings you weren’t invited to. A group of four women who were best friends excluded you from most of their drunken excursions until one summer, you were in the midst of breaking up with one man and falling in love with another, they asked you to go to Cape Cod with their family. Shockingly, your manager approved the excursion.
Days were spent tracking swirls of sand into the bedroom, washing flip flops in the drain out back, walking through steep beachgrass-filled hills on your way to the shore. You recall the sky was lilac-aqua and there were streaks of grey clouds. You all wore sweatshirts with the outline of Massachusetts stamped on the front, drank wine at lunch, and paid for all your meals with cash.
At high tide, there were seals and beyond the seals, sharks. The wind turned your nose and fingertips to frost and your new relationship had not yet become abusive. A few weeks later, he would land a job as a host at the restaurant, your restaurant. As your relationship started to fall apart, the other servers would tell you he didn’t deserve you. In private, he accused you of being too emotionally complicated to sleep with. He lingered outside your house, listening to your phone conversations, and broke into your computer one night while you were both on a trip to your father’s house. He spent several minutes looming over your half-asleep body, breathing heavily before waking you up with just your name. I know you’ve been talking shit about me to your ex, he would say. I don’t know what you’re talking about, you’d whisper back. Haven’t I told you I’m in love with you.
In exchange for those Cape cod nights, your sections were changed when you returned, the managers shrugging. Why would we keep your sections intact when there are other people here, not on vacation, ready to work? Everything good had to be worked for.
Honey Cake
Question: will grilling your heart make it sweeter?
Step 1: melt cream cheese Step 2: only pick ripe fruits Step 3: Honey
Step 4: Drizzle
Step 5: When the lead server loops a tattooed arm through yours, let her. Enter the bathroom and don’t say no when she hands you a bottle of vodka.
The women wore their hair long and curly, tied their apron strings several times around their torsos and kept their server notebooks as wallets. You barely made a hundred dollars at first, but soon you worked your way up. The others thought you were innocent but at your heart you were competitive, hungry. You saw what needed to be done—feigning innocence, stupidity, flirtation with the guests—and soon you were bringing home a thousand dollars a week. Sure, other restaurants could make that in a night, but your restaurant was only open five hours a night. Tucked between bright green trees and a farm across the street, fifteen minutes from your house, the next time over became a new kind of home. A space of longing in the size and shape of a single-floor restaurant with red-black floor patterns and deep brown walls. The tables were glossy as honey, the lights were low-hanging and dim. You burned your fingers on the hot line out back, wedged your body in-between the space of the cash register and the cold window, sneaking cookies out of a to-go box. What you craved the most was attention.
Prep time: Six hours, not including the hospital trip
Cook time: Four hours in the hospital, one hour to drive the long stip of highway from Boston to Sudbury
Servings: 10
Ingredients:
No sé qué va a pasar con mi cabeza
- Arrive at the bar in a group of ten
- Sometime around midnight, realize one of you is missing
- Scour the bar
No se que va a pasar con mi sangre; somos hijas; tu no quieres hablar de todo eso - A bartender finds her passed out in one of the dance halls
- You are the one who calls 9-1-1
- She throws up in the street; her body is limp, like a ragdoll’s
- A friend rides with her to the hospital
Tengo un dolor, como la tierra, como un hueco, como un madre, y tu madre es un hueco y tu es un hueso, vamos a los perros - Nine of you sit in the waiting room and argue about rape and roofies
- Someone mentions what she was wearing; you become so incensed you stop being
friends with him that night - You head off with the lead waitress, in search of bagels
- Everyone except you cheers when they find out she wasn’t roofied
- You return to the restaurant at six in the morning, where all your cars are parked. You eat
doughnuts and pieces of bacon and tell the others to get home safely - The lead waitress laughs and says, no, I’m going to go home dangerously
Voy a las calles, te callas, te sientes mal y yo entiende pero tu no entiendeme
Crisp
Like the surface of the halibut coated in a three-ingredient compound butter. Grilled lemon wedges and fries coated in paprika. Before he dug a screw into your heart and twisted it, things felt romantic. You texted each other before and after work, wishing one another good night. Even though you were off work at nine, you begged to stay until ten so you could sit on the dirty floor of the office while he and the front-of-house manager counted money. At work, he was all business unless behind the line, surrounded by his friends. In the office, after your manager returned to the kitchen to shut down the registers, he whispered to you about the ways in which the restaurant was falling apart. Someone started ordering steaks from a new provider, each were weighed including the plastic, meaning a six-ounce filet mignon was likely five ounces or less, and soon your guests grew disappointed and some even bored with your apologies.
Each time you brought back one of the steaks, he would turn his back to you. These were the days you thought for sure your friendship was over. He would wave his tongs around the air and complain to the sous chef standing next to him, these effing waitresses, he would mutter, even though it was not your fault, there was no way you could have controlled the outcome.
Coat the meat in bees wax to keep it from breaking down
Your manager’s temper was barely noticeable at first. That’s the way it always started, you thought to yourself. Little hints of rage. Unnecessary frustration at mistakes you made, which prompted you to apologize profusely until he told you to be quiet.
Quickly, sure-footed and drooling like starved wolf fangs, entered the rage. Slamming fists and palms on the prep counter, shouting until you felt your insides coil into crisp little blood slugs, you were nothing more than a snack for predators. You started apologizing for every physical movement and the habit stuck with you like a scar. Sorry, I have a question / sorry, I need your help with something / sorry I didn’t put the scalding hot glassware away on the shelf the second it came out of the oven / sorry for crying / sorry I took a guest’s order while the lights were still on and the front door was still open but you were ready to go home.
Each apology was followed by either violence or flirtation, depending on who it came from.
Your manager preferred joking about violence—only after his temper calmed.
Sorry, you said.
He would sigh, rub the space between his eyes. We’ll have to kill you for this. I’ll tape your mouth shut. We’ll feed you to the wolves and then some.
When you apologized to one of the waiters, he told you he wanted to go on a date with you.
We’ll rent a boat on a lake and when we get to the center of the lake, I’ll tie cement blocks around your feet and drown you.
When you apologized to him and the other cooks they made jokes about getting the milk crate, a plastic container which was (allegedly) the perfect height for you to service the men. He told you he would punish you later, messaging you a string of gifs and commands to bend over the next time you were both alone in the walk-in refrigerator. Make it up to me.
Crack two eggs and whisk until smooth. Years later, at a new profession so far removed from waitressing you no longer recognize yourself, your new friends will ask why you apologize so much. Pipe the dough onto a slice of parchment paper. You won’t know how to answer them. Trauma begins to feel an insignificant word. Let the baked goods cool so as to achieve the perfect mirror glaze. You try not to lose track of time, you try not to think too much, but your mind is hungry for chaos. Tú recuardas todo, from los dias llorando, la sangre, todo lo que perdió. Pon el pescado en tu mano y olvídate de él.
Cooking
Most seafood is cooked or boiled alive. It is unclear if some of these creatures experience pain in the same way, except maybe lobsters, whose nervous system alerts them of threat. The abuse has made you unclear of your boundaries. Even when the water is close to a boil, you remain, terrified to move from where you stand in the kitchen, your manager shouting at you so loudly you wonder why a guest doesn’t intervene. He watches from the kitchen and says nothing.
The chef, like the others, knows the wrong stories about you. Some know how this story goes. Your family and friends back home didn’t know you were being abused. Every sexual encounter you detailed to him, whether wanted or unwanted, is turned into a meaty red spear in your gut. You recognize you are in distress but the weapon is made of human flesh and you think to yourself, this, too, is part of it; this is just what happens.
They removed your body from its casing and brought you to the field.
- Please, don’t forget to measure the salt, the butter, rosemary, and garlic.
I don’t want to talk about sexual things right now, you said to him. - Antes then despues, la situation comienza, todovia vamos a reir, pero adios, pero enojada que estoy, Llora en el supermercado, nena, grita.
This is all a joke, anyway, he replied before pushing your boundaries, hoping they would shatter.
Sometimes, you gave in. He’d ask you repeatedly to entertain him as he touched himself in front of his fire place. You sent miscellaneous messages and gifs, sitting cross-legged on the couch and eating a bowl of cereal. Each time he asked you to do something for him, to earn him, you felt certain muscles in your body tense and jolt, as if electrified. Later, your therapist would tell you about the areas where trauma was stored in your body. He pointed to locations on himself, saying here, here, and here. At the time of writing this, your mother has lost half the bone mass in her jaw from an eating disorder. She always asks about the chef. The two of you are mirrors of each other, but the story of your jaws and bones and bodies is meant for another time.
Roast Pork
You leave for an MFA residency in June and when you return, one of your managers is no longer speaking to you. You begin to enter work with such extreme anxiety you become dizzy, disassociate while taking orders. Your fingers turn numb and shaky as you apologize to the bartender, the hostess, a guest, anyone who will listen, you are so, so sorry for your existence mistakes. No one cares; they start to make fun of you for leaving in the middle of the shift to cry.
The chef explains he got into an argument with the manager over a guest’s order and now she is fed up, claiming the kitchen and the back-of-house are against the front-of-house. When you ask him what exactly happened, he tells you stories about “allegedly” (his words) making one of the food runners cry, a young girl not yet eighteen, who accused him of yelling at her.
Did you yell at her? you ask.
What kind of person do you think I am? he responds.
He begins compiling everyone’s mistakes in a three-inch binder. The other managers joke it is his “black book.” Someday, we will all end up in this book. He prints every email, scans receipts and food orders which contain mistakes, saves as much evidence as he possibly can to avoid abuse allegations.
His tone is impossible to read, both online and in person. You can never tell if he is frustrated with you but to accuse him of being angry at you would be offensive, since what kind of person would that make him. You wonder, though, what kind of person you have been made into.
Step 1: Everyone thinks the kitchen is violent and abusive. Tell the servers you don’t know what they’re talking about
Step 2: When one of the kitchen staff tells you to blow him using a cough drop, laugh, tell him, qué chistoso, te amo, do not mention the trauma held in your jaw
Step 3: Arrive at your table with the dishes in order. When a guest tells you they have the wrong steak, your manager will turn to you and hiss, What did you do?
Step 4: Disassociate
Step 5: Apologize to the chef and watch as he ignores you; he will want you to make it up to
him later
Your regulars are obsessed with the special dishes he creates. The health inspector is rumored to secretly be in love with him. He thinks your mother is hot. He tells you he misses when you used to wear dresses at the host desk. You don’t remember interacting with him when he first started, but the kitchen is open and shaped like a horseshoe, everyone visible from the entrance, exit, and bar window. One of your managers hates you; she watches from the dining room, takes notes on a pad of paper, barely speaks unless she’s handing you a wad of twenties. The chef has her fired within the month. You wonder what will happen if you deny him.
Test Kitchen
When you are accepted into a doctoral program, he tells you not to let the other managers know unless you want them to cut your shifts. When at last you need to put in your notice, everyone tells you to stay. The other kitchen staff ask why you’re wasting my time with higher education
when you could continue working at the restaurant and paying off my loans. The servers call you a traitor. Someone puts ice down your shirt. Guests remind you of the time you tried to leave once before, when you were accepted to school in another state then left before you could finish your semester. Aren’t you worried it’s going to end up like Florida? one of them asks.
Another of your regulars congratulates you before telling you it’s okay to quit.
I haven’t started yet, you say, numbly.
I know, but I’m just letting you know if it’s not for you, you should quit and come back.
A family who comes in every Monday night make plans to say goodbye to you. During your final shift, they are still waiting on a table after having arrived fifteen minutes prior. You walk up to the wife and ask if she wants to wait for a table in your section and she jabs a finger in your direction. I don’t know what’s going on, she seethes. Ask them. She points to her husband and his friends. Afterwards, they accept a table not in your section. You leave for school the next day, and never return. Four months into the program, in mid-October, the restaurant closes down.
Sautéing
You knew what happened to you was violent but at the time, you had no words.
What you will need:
- But darling, please don’t forget to make everything tender
- Red pepper flakes sometimes remind you of blood; toss them into the skillet anyway
- Drain your mind in the colander over the sink
- Ask him to use his rag to wipe up the excess meat
He begins to fight you every time you say no. You are no longer working at the same restaurant as him, haven’t seen him in years. He avoids you when you return to the Northeast, even though you begged him to see you every winter break.
Each time you say no and he argues with you, it brings your body back. To the fields, the forests, the bedrooms and breakrooms. You are a broken thing but it doesn’t matter. You try to explain this to him, how talking about things of a sexual nature is exhausting. He says he doesn’t understand, tells you the regular conversations you’ve been having are exhausting for him. You tell him he reminds you of the others, how each time he is upset with you for denying him forms a lightning bolt in your heart, a trigger.
I’m not abusive, he says in response.
I wasn’t calling you that, you try to affirm. But every time you get upset I say no, and it’s upsetting to me.
Ok, is all he ever says and the issue persists each night.
Dessert Oyster
Take your sour and marshmallow, wax candles and the smooth secret of oil; velvet and cream cheese, nutty ice cream, chopped chocolate, unsalted butter, heavy cream, one man and a rubber spatula, gently fold him into the egg whites, be careful he doesn’t deflate. When you kill his vibe [see: boner], he sends you gifs of deflating balloons. There should be multiple batches, toothpicks, fruit scooped of its center. Pain becomes more about sensation than bread, but please, the yeast, plus barely softened butter. Add flour, add egg wash, place your heart on a sheet of plastic wrap and roll it out until it’s six inches on all sides. Set it aside. When your manager yells at you in front of the entire restaurant, know the chef won’t rescue you. Later he’ll talk shit with you via text, like always, but some of your adoration has lost its spark. Repeat until the dough is large enough to roll into nine triangles, then fold each into rolls. Little silly silver-flour pastry, the night he stayed after with the manager and his sous chef, your then best friend and another server, the six of you drinking tequila from a slender bottle on New Year’s Eve, you accidentally dropped a chocolate gold coin between his legs and your phone lit up from its place on the counter, with images of hot fudge and sauce, drizzles of glaze, you were nothing but a softness to be pressed between pieces of parchment paper. Silky, sticky, firmly packed, droplet, chilled, stirred, gooey, tired, extract as much sweetness as possible, discard the rind.
Sea Snail
You hoped, back then, that all the torture was disguising love. Only later, the two of you having finally stopped speaking, do you understand the toxicity.
Paper Thin Scallop Ghost
God / smooth / muttered under your breath / yolky / dining in a house-turned-maze / always with the food / I’m no good / torn / lost in the hallway / that night can still heal / night as mussel / keep losing / again / again / suffocate / I’m trying / swallowed like sand / drowned / pretend to be healthy / the truth yawned / I am less-than / love a lobster / the sea swallows the guests / I’m scared / night is coming.
Butcher
For your final course, you have two options:
- Leave
- Decay
Sam Moe is a poet and prose writer with pieces published or forthcoming from The Texas Review, The Missouri Review, South Florida Poetry Journal (SoFloPoJo), Zoetic Press, and others.