SO, GHOULSBY? I MEAN, WE all hated that guy. He was the only S.O.B. on the line who wanted to be there. He knew what a julienne was, and he brought his own knives to work, and he insisted that I was Chef and you were Chef and every goddamn person to step foot in that kitchen was Chef, too. It made the rest of us sick. We didn’t want to be there at all, and we didn’t have time for his bullshit. He was always telling dad jokes. Like, here’s one: What’s orange and sounds like a parrot? A carrot! Hahaha! And, of course, he’d be chop-chop-chopping a whole ass carrot stick while he said it. He’d be smiling so big it was scary—his jagged-ass corn kernel teeth leaping. But okay. He wasn’t all bad. He was pretty nice, actually. I’d be slicing potatoes all wrong, and he’d tap me on the shoulder like, Hey, buddy, can I show you this thing? And I’d let him because he was a certified knife-wielding wizard. He’d walk me through it nice and slow, talking about hand movement and finger muscles and shit I’d never considered once in my life. He’d slice, and the blade would go shwing, then frunk, on the cutting board. It was music. He’d tell me I got this, and I’d believe him. That was something about Ghoulsby you had to admit—he could make you believe the stupidest shit. But, yeah. He was just never gonna work out here. Most people don’t. See, he went and did this silly thing, which was fall in love with a server named Annabelle. He fell so deeply, it was all he ever talked about. Eighty-five open menus, we’re all sweating and cussing and damn near crying, and he’s over on grill talking about, ‘Hey, man, I think I might write Annabelle a poem.’ Like, sure, brother, but first? Make me a fucking LTOP! He gave her the poem, though. And the crazy part was that she loved it. She wanted more poems. Ghoulsby and Annabelle were head over heels for each other, and it didn’t matter how insulting or dumb it was to the rest of us. Ghoulsby got distracted. He started rushing through his closing duties so he could go run off with her. The prep cooks would clock in the next morning, and they’d freak out because the flattop hadn’t been wiped down, or the floor hadn’t been swept, or the tomatoes had been left out overnight. Bossman was pissed about it. He told Ghoulsby he needed to get his shit together, that the team relied on his “warrior leadership”. But Ghoulsby couldn’t seem to help himself. Really, it was the swans that did him in. Those fucking swans. Any free time he had, he’d go over to salad and cut up an apple—shwing, frunk, shwing, frunk—until its pieces were stacked up into the shape of a beautiful, browning swan. He’d leave it on the expo line until Annabelle eventually came by and saw it. She’d look at Ghoulsby, then at the apple swan, then back at Ghoulsby, and she’d blow him a kiss. When Bossman saw a swan, he’d yell at Ghoulsby and toss it in the trash. Ghoulsby would apologize, but he never once stopped making them. Every time Bossman threw a swan away, he’d wait an hour or so, then go right back to salad and chop up another one. Leave it on the expo line and wait for his kiss. He was burning through four or five apples a day, enough product that eventually Bossman had to deliver an ultimatum—Either Ghoulsby stopped fucking with the apples, or he was done. Fired. It seemed obvious to the rest of us that he would chill for a bit. He loved this job. That was his whole thing. That was why we didn’t fucking like the guy. But wouldn’t you know, he didn’t stop at all. The next afternoon, he cut up the most beautiful swan he’d ever made. He used his special Japanese knife that didn’t brown the flesh. There were no shwings or frunks, just a whispered fsssh that sounded like wind. He wrote a poem on a napkin, and he set the swan right where he’d left the other ones. He looked around the kitchen. He didn’t seem so sure about something. Then he looked at me and, I swear, he became sure. He sheathed his knife. He untied his apron. He left. Ghoulsby left the damn restaurant, exactly how the rest of us had talked about leaving for years. We couldn’t believe it. And the swan was there, too. It was glowing under the heat lamp, waiting for Annabelle to find it. When Bossman walked in and saw it, he went fucking nuts. We had to tell him over and over again that Ghoulsby wasn’t here, that he’d left out of nowhere. He didn’t buy it. He said Ghoulsby was just taking a smoke break—he’d be back, we’d see. But I knew that he wasn’t coming back. I’d seen it on his face that he wasn’t. I grabbed the swan from under the heat lamp. I read the poem on the napkin, except it wasn’t a poem at all. It was a joke: What do you call two apples in the same bowl? A pear. •   





Zach Alan Michael sells books in Kansas City, MO. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in HAD, BULL, BRUISER, Scaffold, and others.

Twitter