The phrase, “To have a long day” reveals a lot about the human psyche. For instance, take the fact that any day, defined as a stretch of 24 hours, cannot by definition be any longer or shorter than another. It logically follows that the supposed “length” of the day refers to something perceptual, rather than factual. Such a sensation of the passage of time is brought about not by any observations that the person having the long day makes, but by the emotions that the events within that timespan conjure. What one must conclude is that one will always perceive something more sharply and more vividly when they are not enjoying it.
And that’s kind of bullshit.
Corey silently wrapped up this very tidy-feeling train of thought in a neat little mental bow with the words so there written on it. This was very nicely timed, as his entire psyche was immediately completely filled with the sound of the massive dishwashing machine behind him. It was responding to being activated incorrectly by promptly jamming a fork into the space between a cog and a long-discarded sieve in an act of noble self-sacrifice. “Nellie”, as the kitchen staff was repeatedly told to call it, was once again dead. Corey looked down at his handiwork, and realized that the item he had been scrubbing with a yellow sponge for 30 seconds straight was, as he feared, a cheese grater. He could do nothing about his mistake except stare listlessly at the grated sponge adorning the sink before him. His shift at the diner was almost over. Almost.
###
“Dad, I have to go wee. Can I go to the bathroom?”
Ludd’s father Giles, leaning 45 degrees off his chair, gave a distracted wave-off while his other hand braced against the table to keep him upright. A moose two blocks down from the diner was faltering in its staring contest with him, and pride dictated Giles’ continued eye contact, no matter the discomfort of the viewing angle. Ludd shuffled off the booth bench and headed for what looked like the back of the diner. He was a little embarrassed. He had told a fib when he said “bathroom”. He wanted something else:
Locks. To practice on.
There was a bathroom door and a big pair of swingy metal doors, but also a glass door to outside. Ludd went through the glass door. Now Ludd was in a parking lot. He looked around. Ludd was smart. He knew which things always had a padlock on ‘em; chain-link fences, parking lot gates, abandoned luggage, parked rental moving trucks, shuttered food carts, exterior breaker boxes, water meters, or the occasional shed.
But none of those things were there. There were just cars, and cars are boring. So Ludd kept looking. Around the corner to the left, Ludd found something. A housey-looking door knob on the back of the diner. Ludd liked doorknobs. They have lots of pins. Ludd got out his tools and began work.
###
Giles finally blinked. For all his effort and eyestrain, he let the moose get the better of him. He melodramatically slumped back into his seat. As a silver lining, Giles’ coffee was once again in his line of sight. He was so delighted that he decided to celebrate with an infinitesimal sip in the silence of the diner. It was the last sip of the mug as bad luck would have it. But Ludd, being in the bathroom, afforded Giles a little more time to enjoy the stillness until he got back.
The crowd in the diner was a quiet one this time, especially so close to closing. Besides him, there was a very fidgety lady with a purse entirely and completely full of pilfered packets of every substance that has ever been committed to packet, and for each substance at least a dozen different brands represented. The only thing in her mind was spending the perfect minimum non-suspicious amount of time to remain before exfiltrating with the blackberry jam. She wouldn’t think of drawing attention by making noise. Out of Giles’ line of sight was a hard-of-hearing couple in the messy-public-screaming stage of the classical horrendous breakup, but they were doing it in sign language, and thus in complete silence. The current topic was the mortal insult of the boyfriend’s veteran’s day gift for the girlfriend’s cousin, a fluffy pink onesie with the Metallica logo on one side and the Death Grips logo on the other. Apparently, no one could get the cousin out of the onesie, and it had ruined the anniversary photo shoot.
Giles, if he could understand an iota of sign language and was looking, no doubt would have sided with the cousin, not for taste (God, no), but on principle. But, blissfully unperturbed, he simply glanced out his window to find an unexpectedly far-closer-than-before moose, and was perturbed. The moose had ostensibly gained a taste for a staring contest rematch, except apparently the rematch was with the fries that Giles had ordered by themselves (like some sort of fuckin’ weirdo, Corey had thought at the time).
The moose politely (for a moose) but forcefully (being a moose) began to reach out for the fries, and on account of its antlers, suddenly became aware of the concept of glass.
###
One candidate for the least convenient convenience device ever brought into a horrible beeping existence was slung at Corey’s side. On his belt was (allegedly) an even more advanced alternative to the digital clock-in system of industrial kitchens past. With a wireless connection and several buttons for every kind of midwork break or absence, the stupid piece of junk “wage gauge” did a wonderful job of complicating and lengthening the process of communicating with management by losing connection so often that even after pressing the button, everyone still had to double-check that the signal went through, discover that it of course did not, and then fiddle with the device interminably until it did.
Somehow, however, Corey had managed to subvert its purpose through months of meditation, practice, and surreptitious modification, such that he could initiate lunch break with a flick of his wrist. In the end, when he heard screams and shattering glass from the main room of the diner, Corey knew that all his time spent was to pay off. As the manager tore around the corner to find someone to get this fucking animal out of here, he only saw the cheery LCD display at Corey’s waist indicating that Corey was not beholden to anyone for the next fifteen minutes. Corey swept past the manager towards the kitchen exit.
His theatrical departure was sabotaged, however, when his hip painfully met the very corner of the stainless steel countertop marking the south part of the narrow gap that the kitchen staff called “The Trench Run” just because of how often that happened. Corey soldiered on, out the kitchen door, past the restroom, and out the back.
###
Ludd was getting mad. The doorknob should have grease in it, but it didn’t. Ludd didn’t have grease. So Ludd was having trouble. Ludd thought he had set all of the pins, but the lock wouldn’t turn. Ludd tried pushing the tensioner a little, then a lot, then an amount in between, but it didn’t work. Ludd pulled out his diagram, sat down against the door, and tried to spend some time thinking. He knew second-hand that in this situation he should try to, what was it, “vis-yu-al-eyes” the inside of the lock, but he never could get a handle on that part.
Ludd heard a weird sound. He didn’t know what it was.
###
Giles landed on his tailbone in the effort of avoiding the fragments of shattered diner window and quickly came to regret it. The hard-of-hearing couple startled without verbalizing and promptly made for the exit, while the kleptomaniac, in a screaming panic, plunged the purse with the pilfered plastic packet payload upon the floor. Compartmentalized condiments covered the checkerboard tiles. While he waited for his rear end to stop screaming at him not to move, Giles observed the curious brown mass above him. Antlers, it seemed, went together rather poorly with window frames, and the result this time was that Giles’ fries were out of reach of the moose. Seeing his fries potentially safe, Giles breathed a sigh of relief, which was quickly choked out by what he would previously have described as extremely powerful dog-breath. He felt a surge of confidence (alongside the gag reflex), which prompted him to try and snag his fries away to safety.
He was not expecting the moose to, in that very moment, shed its antlers for the winter and step through the window.
Giles could only conclude that the fries were well and truly lost. The moose was beginning maneuvers to chase him off of the fries in earnest, and it was very much working. He bolted to the bathroom where he knew that Ludd was. The moose lumbered after him to entrench its fry ownership, but in the process crushed the pile of packets underhoof, spilling the packet contents everywhere. It slipped and found itself suddenly on the ground. When the moose got up, Giles was gone and the moose’s underside was left stained by mustard, coffee creamer, soy sauce, cream cheese, soda flavoring, wasabi, baking yeast, 2% milk, silica gel, and type AB+ blood. Blood bags and mustard packets are structurally identical, after all.
Giles took the extra time and made it to the bathroom. Right as he passed the kitchen door, one of the kitchen staff theatrically swept past him and out the back door with a slight limp that he was trying very hard to hide. Neither of them noticed each other.
###
Corey was safely in the back alley, and his leg was already feeling better, as was he. Surely, the rest of the kitchen staff, hardened veterans all, could appropriately address whatever the fuck was going down in there by the time the little timer on his waist called him back into his horrid serfdom. He scurried out of sight into the little nook he always used to avoid stilted breaktime conversation, and was startled by a stout figure seated with his back to the rear door.
The figure looked up past the unfolded diagram he was holding to reveal the face of an inadvisably friendly 10-year-old.
“Hi, mister!”
“Uh, hi? Are you lost? What are you doing?”
“Practicing.”
The figure was, as Corey could plainly see, sitting on the ground and holding a diagram.
“It looks like you’re sitting on the ground and holding a diagram.”
“Well it wasn’t working, so I stopped.”
Fuck it, Corey thought, I’ll bite.
“What wasn’t working? Can you show me?”
Corey stared in growing astonishment as the 10 year old with a damp pants-seat stood up, took a lockpick out of his pocket, and got to work on the back door of his workplace. Of course, workplace duty would bid Corey to tell this trespasser to stop, but Corey was on break. Instead, for the minute and a half of silence to follow, there was only one thought in Corey’s head.
This is the coolest 10-year-old to ever exist.
At a seemingly random point, this strange child twisted himself around to face Corey and said “See!? It isn’t working!”. At this, Corey leaned over the child’s head and tried very desperately to look like he knew what he was doing. Eventually, he realized that he would have to come up with a suggestion. Fearing the worst, he began to speak.
“Have you tried… Maybe turning it the other way?”
“That’s stupid, mister. Keys turn to the right, everyone knows that.”
“Yeah, but, like, maybe this is an old lock that got made before that got decided. Like, if the guy that made this door was around really long ago, maybe nobody told them that all locks went to the right and they made the lock go to the left instead by mistake.”
Corey braced for the child’s reaction, and was met with contemplative acceptance. It was the perfect suggestion, he realized. Plausible sounding (to a 10 year old), and laden with plausible deniability when it didn’t work. Well that didn’t open it, he’d say when this kid got done, but really, we had no way of knowing that it wouldn’t. Of course, by that point he’d have thought up all sorts of other things that could conceivably be the problem.
Then the kid standing in front of him actually turned the doorknob and started opening the door.
Beyond the shock, horror, and admiration that Corey was feeling was the realization that he only knew of two doors in and out of the restaurant; The back one next to the restroom and the front one next to the large bay window. Corey legitimately did not know where this one led. Not about to be outdone by a primary schooler, Corey tried to open the door and found it stuck, but with enough give that it was apparent that it just needed a little more force.
Corey put his entire weight into the doorframe. There was a sound of tearing something, and the door swung wide.
###
The permanent installation of the metal table at the center of the kitchen was a bad move in a number of ways that seemed to the manager to never stop growing. Firstly, the table was a fair bit larger than it looked in the catalog. So when it was placed, the gap between it and the doorframe was a little bit tighter than the catalog implied that it would be. So on top of the rather ridiculous sight of the kitchen staff using only the front half of the table on account of not having 6 foot arms was the not-very-occasional dropped dish resulting from the corner of that table being a fair bit further to the left than the person carrying the caramel swirl cheesecake estimated. It became a local legend among the kitchen staff, who began calling it the Trench Run.
And then came the health and safety inspector, who once again made everything more complicated by swinging open the door next to the table and revealing that it didn’t have clearance to open fully. It was bad enough that by default it opened into a narrow gap that someone could be passing through at the time, but worse was the fact that the door itself could be destroyed just by opening it with too much force. The diner was given a time limit of two weeks to solve the problem before there would be a follow-up inspection. Of course, the table was never going to move, not after all the money spent putting it in. So instead, the manager did something else entirely.
The inspector fell ill two weeks later after licking something on the job three towns over. His stand-in wasn’t properly briefed on what she was looking for on the follow-up, besides “that gap with the door”, and besides that, she really wasn’t much for confrontation anyways. When she got there, she simply saw a gap that was half a millimeter over the federal minimum. There was no door. There was no door frame. There wasn’t even so much as a protrusion or indentation in the wall. While the inspector’s stand-in didn’t like the fact that there was a gap in this kitchen narrow enough to have a nickname, the law was fine with it. She concluded that someone misspoke or misheard, and left without giving so much as a stern warning.
###
Ludd was not in the bathroom. Giles checked again. Ludd was still not in the bathroom. Giles checked again. Ludd, in a cruel act of dire malice and treachery, did not magically appear in one of the stalls. Giles felt dismayed, and began having second thoughts about his methodology. After a few minutes of contemplation and hyperventilation, he came to the conclusion that Ludd would not be found in the bathroom, and left to try another door.
Giles dashed out of the bathroom and split-second-surveyed his options. There was the glass back exit door, the path back to the main room where the moose was (last he saw it), and the large metal double-door to the kitchen. A coin flipped in Giles’ head and he pivoted around to the kitchen door, still at full speed. Giles body-checked the metal kitchen push-doors and kept running. He meant to look around to see if Ludd was visible, but all he could see once he was clear of the door was brown fur.
Giles slammed headfirst into the side of a moose, which had wandered into this lovely gray room where all the food was. His feet went out from under him and his momentum carried him forward, assisted by a frictionless floor befilthed with liquid who-knows-what-at-this-point. The moose jerked its snout out of the industrial stand-mixer half full of spiced ground beef and turned away from the direction it was hit from to escape its assailant. However, Giles had slid so far forward that he had gone all the way between the legs of the moose and wound up on the other side, in front of it. He scrambled to his feet, turned around and booked it, pursued closely by a massive frightened animal that saw him as an obstacle.
The wall just in front of Giles posed a small problem. Forward wasn’t going to work, and behind was out of the question. Giles flipped another coin, went left, and underestimated a particular gap between an obscenely large table and a highly innocuous wall. His thigh met the very corner of the table and he went to the floor, again. Sprawled on his back, he watched in horror as the moose made the same decision to go left and began lining itself up to squeeze through the gap. There was no regard for Giles on the part of the moose here; all 1,243 pounds of moose was going directly over him, hooves and all. Giles braced for pain of the hooves and the hospital bill to follow.
And then the wall above him opened.
Giles heard the sound of tearing paint and hinges remembering 14 years of disuse. A door that had a door-sized sheet of plywood duct-taped over it and then covered in paint to blend in seamlessly with the wall swung open into the legendarily hazardous Trench Run. Some random member of the kitchen staff was holding the doorknob, and Ludd was standing behind him. The moose, partway through the gap, was hit squarely in the nose. It reared and spun around. The entire animal flew through the door from the kitchen into the main room, clear over the pastry display case, and through the remaining intact section of the bay window. Fragments of glass rang out as they fell and bounced, and eventually settled. Once again, the diner was completely silent.
###
Corey aimlessly waded in a haze through the upturned kitchenware, cooking ingredients, and a colorfully stained man’s profuse thank-yous for taking care of his son. This diner, he mused, had been absolutely fucked up. There wasn’t a thing left resting on a shelf or a table, at least not right-way-up. Nowhere else before in his most blissful envisionings had Corey seen the kitchen and this diner in such a state. The main room was almost as satisfying to look at, with shattered (tempered) glass on every inch of floor and a psychedelic-looking streaked stain leading to the kitchen.
Suddenly, Corey’s waist began beeping. The tactile “rest break” button unseated itself from the pressed position. This sent Corey into a mild panic. His eyes again swept over the vibrant colors of the floor and the dented kitchenware scattered there, the decommissioned Nellie, and the long-forgotten shredded sponge. He snatched the device from his belt and clutched it to his face, a half-second from melodramatically strangling it for the endless cleaning it had consigned him to. He wanted to see them, the words “BREAK OVER” printed on the display, cheerily condemning him to the unimaginable task around him.
Corey looked at the screen. “SHIFT COMPLETE”.
Corey threw the wage gauge like he’d accidentally picked up a handful of melted steel and ran before someone stopped him.
Max Cheskin
Biography: At the start of the pandemic, I began taking part in video game jams, team-based pseudo-competitions for making simple games. What I learned there drove my hobbies, major, and outlook on life.
During the Fall 2024 term, I had less time, but still wanted to create. Since games are always better off with a good story, I decided to practice by writing some.
My games are simple and small, so I don’t charge. Please note that my sole credit is the concepts, design, and code of the games; most sprites and music were made by others.
Artist Statement: Video game development is an inherently collaborative practice. It involves digital art, music composition, narrative storytelling, and of course, programming. Coordinating with other specialists is paramount. All but one of my submissions to this journal contain links to other people.
More than the problem-solving aspect, beyond the artistic expression, greater than the satisfaction of a job well-done, is the fun of discovering new people to work with. Even though my work so far simply amounts to just learning and practice, the people I have found have been as enjoyable an aspect of the medium as my own journey of growth.
