Rather be on Venus
Nothing survives on the surface of Venus. If the crushing air pressure doesn’t get you, if you can survive the air acidic enough to burn away your lungs, you still have to deal with the temperature. Nine hundred degrees is enough to melt your skin in the four seconds you’d last without a pressurized suit filtering all the CO2 out of the atmosphere. And still, knowing all of that, Darrel couldn’t help but wish he was on Venus rather than doing drive-through on Friday night.
“CAN I GET ONE — “ The ancient microphone gave a short squeal of feedback into Darrel’s ear. “HOLD THE PICKLES. BUT GIVE ME DOUBLE — “
Darrel held the ear-piece far enough from his ear that the woman’s voice only threatened temporary hearing problems. “Ma’am? Could you repeat that?”
“I SAID, CAN I GET ONE Mc — “
Another squeal of feedback loud enough to be heard on the moon. Darrel wiped his hand over his face with an exasperated sigh. “Pull around! Pull around!”
The microphone hidden in the clown’s mouth outside had been old before he’d even known what a cheeseburger was. These days his universe rotated around cheeseburgers and they still hadn’t fixed the microphone. If only he’d be able to get another job. But King Burger paid fifteen cents less an hour, and he’d already been fired from ChickenMan for missing a mandatory holiday shift.
Darrel slapped on his brightest smile as a beat-up Chevy cavalier pulled up to his window. The trick, he’d found, was to kill them with kindness.
The only occupant, an older woman with dyed blonde hair and a face more cratered than Mars, didn’t give him a second to breathe. “Your ears broken or something? Near lost my voice trying to order the food,” she said around the unlit Marlboro in her mouth.
“Sorry about that. Microphone’s on the fritz again. What can I get for you?”
“One cheeseburger, hold the pickles. Double mustard, double ketchup. And hurry it up back there,” she gave a grunt of irritation. “Waste five minutes of my life for a shitty cheeseburger,”
“Anything else for you?”
She looked up incredulously, half of her arm stuck deep into her firetruck red purse like she was stuffing a turkey at Thanksgiving. “Do you see anyone else in the car? Now you gotta make fun of the fact I’m single?”
“No I — “ he swallowed his apology. “That’ll be five seventy five,”
“I know how much it is,” Her arm came out clutching a crumpled wad of bills and a few loose coins. She practically threw it through the window at him.
Change clattered over the sticky brown flooring. Darrel knelt down to pick it up one penny at a time. His shaking hands made it hard to get leverage. There’s always got to be one customer who thinks they’re doing you a favor by ordering here. A few nickels had bounced through the door into the hallway, and a quarter had somehow wedged itself under his cash register. His fingers couldn’t quite reach under the smooth metal to tease it back out.
“You still there? Or are you having trouble counting out my change?” the lady called out.
“Just one more second,” he grabbed a pencil from the table and flicked it underneath the register. The quarter shot out into his waiting palm. “And done. Here’s your receipt with twenty cents in change. Gimme two seconds and I’ll have the food right out,”
He gave a double tap on the wall with his fist to tell Vernon he needed the order finished right away. Luckily Vernon was on top of his game. The guy had worked here longer than nearly anyone else. He could pump burgers out of that grill so fast he needed two spatulas and a four foot clearance around him at all times. Thirty seconds of stony silence later a paper wrapped burger slid out of the hole in the wall and dropped into the waiting paper bag.
Darrel held it out the window. “Sorry about the wait, ma’am. Enjoy the burger,”
“Enjoy this you, slow bitch,” An opened packet of mustard splashed through the window and bounced off of Darrel’s face. Thick, goopy mustard ran down where it soaked into his black uniform shirt. “Suck it!”
A flash of anger ran through Darrel’s chest. Before he could stop himself he’d grabbed his glass of water and thrown it back at the car. The plastic cup thunked off the window, doing nothing but leaving the car slightly cleaner that it had been before.
Darrel’s rage bled out as he watched the car peel out of the parking lot. Goddamn prick. He tried to blot the mustard out quickly, but the only thing that did was sink the stain deeper into the fibers. =He wouldn’t be able to wear this tomorrow looking like this.
A electronic tone sounded in his headset as another car pulled up to the drive-through sensor. His headset crackled with another burst of static. “Hello? Y’all got the day off today? I need a cheeseburger and a large fry with no salt. Sin sal, comprende?”
Darrel gave up on wiping his shirt and punched the next order into the computer with his middle finger. “Seven twenty five. Pull around,”
It didn’t take long for Timothy to call him into the office during a lull in customers. Much like the restaurant, the office was cramped, filled with a thousand lingering smells that no one needed to investigate.
“You better have a good reason for what I saw on the cameras,” Timothy said, his chin waggling with every word. “What in the good goddamn graces of our Lord Jesus Christ made you attack a customer?”
Timothy was a good guy, if a bit slow and stuck in his ways. Darrel had spent most of the last month closing the restaurant with him, sharing jokes about rude customers over a dirty mop. He could tell none of that was going to matter now. “Did the cameras see the part where she threw mustard at me?” Darrel pulled his shirt free from his waistband to showcase the mottled yellow stain. “How am I going to get this out?”
“Did I ask for an excuse? You. Attacked. A. Customer,” Each word was interspersed with a slap of Timothy’s sausage fingers against the desk. “What if she presses charges for assault?”
Darrel’s stomach clenched tight. “You have it on camera that she threw the mustard at me. Right? How could she press charges?”
“Cameras ain’t gonna protect you when they cancel the restaurant. They’ll come back with signs and hashtags. Then we’re both out of a job, all because you couldn’t your goddamn emotions in check. You’re done for the day. I’ll have the system dock an hour on top of that for the drink you threw.”
A cold flush ran down Darrel’s face. Getting sent home meant working less hours, and rent was due next Monday. Rent didn’t give a shit about being canceled. It cared about being paid. “You can’t be serious! I did nothing but be nice to her. I smiled, I apologized for the wait, I picked her goddamn change off these grimy fucking floors. And you’re taking her side? Are you kidding me?”
Timothy made a show of grabbing for the open bottle of coke and moving it out of reach of Darrel. “I don’t make company policy,”
“You do! You literally wrote the restaurant handbook. All you have to do is agree with me and I can be back on drive-through making you money,”
“Then you agree that I make the rules? Because the rules say you’re done for the day,”
“Vernon’ll come with me,” The threat slipped out of Darrel’s throat like a mis-timed orbital maneuver.
“No, he won’t. That man’s got another son on the way. You think he gives a lick about a little mustard on his shirt? Get out of here and I’ll call you with next week’s schedule,” Timothy fixed Darrel with a watery-eyed stare. “Keep talking and I won’t,”
Darrel’s feet shifted against the flooring. His hands turned into fists of granite down by his side. His eyes shot solar flares into Timothy’s face, but in the end he knew it was useless. He could fight, he could argue, but in the end none of that would matter. Tomorrow would come and he’d either have a job or he wouldn’t. Fast food, like space, didn’t tolerate failure.
Ten minutes later, Darrel walked alone through quiet suburban streets on his way home. White picket fences stood sentry in front of blue painted houses and lush green lawns. He didn’t always walk this way home. In fact, turning down Walden instead of Jefferson made his walk take an extra fifteen minutes. That was just enough time to finish a joint.
The night air felt crisp enough to send a shiver down his arms. He walked, and puffed, letting his mind fill with all the anger and resentment from the day. He could still feel the grainy mustard sliding down his face. Could still see the way Timothy’s face flushed in fear at the thought of offending a customer.
He stopped in the park to sit on a picnic bench and look up through the branches at the twinkling stars above. A million light years away sounded like the best place he could think of to be at the moment. Did the stars worry about rent? Did they deal with asshole customers with more attitude than common sense? Did they have to worry about being fired? But tomorrow the sun would rise. The kaleidoscope of stars would rotate around the world once again.
And, God willing, he’d be back at the drive-through fantasizing about Venus.
Rather be on Venus was originally published in Sixty Minute Stories on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.