The floor stuck to everyone’s boots for weeks. Even after several rounds of mopping with the stuff that makes my head hurt, it still felt like stepping on whatever the opposite of sacred ground is. The Flavourtown employee handbook gave us explicit instructions on how to clean most everything a human body can produce: piss, pus, blood. Even a touching illustration on how to cheer up a crying, unattended child.
But this?
Nah, there was nothing in the handbook for Stevie’s last little experiment.
After the court-mandated team counseling session, management forbade discussing it further in no uncertain terms. That stuck too and so a curtain of forced silence fell across the rank-and-file Flavourtown crew. That little ‘u’ had long served as an effective shield, legally speaking, sparing us from the spicy wrath of Guy Fieri’s lawyers and allowing our half-baked affront to the culinary arts to continue riding his flame shirt coattails.
Stevie got the boot and not one wept. On his best days, he was a breeze that blew every which way but the convenient. On his worst, a tornado that flung spatulas and culturally insensitive slurs at coworkers and patrons, especially when the damn swinging door wouldn’t stay shut. Still, the man knew how to grill mid-quality meat and showed up for shifts in body if not soul. As far as Flavourtown was concerned, that’s what mattered: feet in boots, boots on floor, no matter how sticky.
After closing one night, Shelly—the one with the shitty white girl dread she kept half-hidden behind her ear when she worked the front—walked around ringing bells and burning sage. Said the stickiness wasn’t just physical but energetic as well. When management saw the video, they cut her hours for a couple weeks, until Henry slipped and fractured his metatarsal while deep frying frozen jalapeño pig poppers, then she came back working more than before. When I first got hired, we fooled around in the dry storage room. She did a spectral reading on me that said my aura was russet brown, and that like the bagged potatoes we once laid upon to make such illicit tender love, my eyes would never really open.
I didn’t miss Stevie. He never threw spatulas specifically at me but didn’t bother to learn my name or look me in the eye despite years of handing him plates. On his good days he’d crack jokes, grab asses, but he never reached for mine. Not that I wanted him to grab it, but I wanted him to at least try, so I’d have shared the stage he owned so effortlessly, even if it was a bit part.
I asked Shelly one night while we were closing what she thought Stevie had been trying to create in what came to be his swan song. If it was worth it. Shelly paused, put down the trash bag overstuffed with expired Dorito-blasted peanut butter dip formula, and looked me in the eyes in a way she hadn’t since our last tater tryst.
“I don’t think he was trying to make anything in particular.” Her gaze drifted far from mine, beyond the bright walls of Flavourtown. “Stevie was an artist.”
“The man stumbled through every shift. He should be in jail.”
She shrugged, dragging the trash bag through the door. “You asked, I answered.”
I watched her heave the trash into the dumpster. Flecks of dried queso-adjacent dip fluttered around her like orange snowflakes. When she looked at me again, whatever light her eyes ever held for mine had faded.
Stevie never returned to Flavourtown. He wasn’t welcome back as an employee, customer, or any other capacity. Management didn’t go so far as to hang a photo of him like an outlaw around the place, but we all knew he’d been banned.
I’m the longest tenured employee at Flavourtown now, even though we sure-as-shit don’t have tenure or even dental. I never say that aloud or even think about it too deeply. If I do I either can’t sleep, or worse, I do sleep and dream Flavourtown dreams. Every wall and counter has frosted-tipped tendrils that wave me closer. The spatulas and plates I grab to defend myself stick to my hands like tar, until I’m covered head to toe by things I never wanted to touch but now cannot let go.
Months after the incident, I saw Stevie rollerblading on the bike trail wearing shorts shorter than the general conception of shorts. His bare thighs smooth as glass, his shitty stick-and-poke tattoos of leaves twirling in the wind glistened with sweat as he glided. Not breaking stride, he passed, looking lighter than light, a beautiful blur of weightless grace, while I still felt my boots stick wherever I stepped.