Let’s all get up and sing a song to Liz.
Servant of We, the Restaurant Gods.
Glimpse her gentle façade.
Ponytailed.
Skin like a welcoming cup of café au lait.
Wire-frame eyeglasses slipping down her freckled button nose, sweat-slicked from the July heat.
Behold her fingernails, blunted and worn from polishing drinking glasses.
Those none-too-pretty fingers, encased in sweat-inducing nitrile, pushed block after block of pecorino romano over a metal grater, shaving the aged dairy into ribbons.
This was part of the laundry list of pre-shift side work.
Done in the hour before Morganti’s Italian Bistro opened.
When the servers scrambled hither and yon like sugar-jacked toddlers to get the joint ready for dinner service.
Hectic work but mindless.
Left plenty of time for murder talk.
#
Liz transferred off-white slivers of cheese to a big, white ceramic bowl.
She said, “I like to think if I committed a murder, I could get away with it.”
Rae, her coworker, tattooed and foul-mouthed, countered, “The fuck makes you think that?”
“Kill somebody in the heat of passion, you’re fucked.”
Liz, glancing at Rae over the top of her glasses: “I’m talking premeditation, obviously.”
“I’m pretty sure I could plan a murder.”
“You know, get a boat, take it to the middle of the ocean…”
And on it went.
Liz, Our servant Liz, loved murder.
Voraciously consumed murder podcasts.
Murder documentaries.
Murder books, fiction and non.
She went online, looked up photos of actual murders, of which they were unnervingly legion.
Once, at a bar after work, Liz showed some of these photos to her coworkers.
Several of them gagged.
Rae puked.
Liz didn’t see what the big deal was.
But then, Liz’s stomach was particularly strong.
Had to be.
She figured, Work two jobs six days a week while taking care of elderly parents, one of whom has cancer.
She figured, After all that, honey, murder ain’t shit.
#
Misfortune yanked Liz from Atlanta.
We, the Restaurant Gods, adore misfortune.
Misfortune makes better servants, gods know.
The previous fall, Liz’s mother, Cynthia, phoned Liz, broke the bad news.
“It’s your father, honey.”
“Lung cancer.”
“Stage three.”
“Gonna try treatment.”
“Doctors are, uh, hopeful.”
No sign of request in Cynthia’s cracking, strained voice.
The strained cracks pleaded with Liz, though.
“Come home,” they said.
“Please help.”
Liz imagined her father, Renaldo.
Fingers drumming the arms of his battered, beloved brown armchair.
Scared.
Teeth rubbing his bottom lip, jaundiced Chiclets sunk into roseate pucker.
Worried.
Coughing red nickels into a pocket hanky.
Vulnerable.
No longer her Superman.
Liz imagined her mother.
Face drawn.
Spare tire-compressed butt sunk into the couch.
Weak.
Purple pouches hung under blue-grey eyes.
Exhausted.
Blood pressure cuff python-tight around her fleshy bicep.
Hypertensive.
A caretaker who needs her own caretaker.
Liz’s quest was clear: return home to Lower Slower Delaware, to Lewes.
Help Mom and Dad.
#
“Nine months of heaven, three months of hell.”
The unofficial slogan of Lower Slower, of the communities that span coastal southern Delaware.
Liz found this out the hard way.
Fall, winter, and spring were cake.
Easy as pie.
Liz acquired not one but two serving jobs.
One, a diner in Lewes, working the breakfast shift.
Two, a restaurant in downtown Rehoboth Beach, Morganti’s, working the dinner shift.
She toiled.
Bone-weary.
Stressed.
Yet she persevered.
We, the Restaurant Gods, smiled upon her.
Until We didn’t.
Cool air grew warmer in Lower Slower, heaven giving way to hell.
Liz soon found herself encased in a non-stop crush of entitled, slopsucking vacationers from Philly, D.C., Maryland, Virginia, Jersey.
All slogged into Lower Slower via Route 1, the main artery in and out of the area.
So clogged during the summer it might as well be called The Widowmaker.
In the off-season, it took Liz about fifteen minutes to get from Lewes to Rehoboth.
During the summer?
Nearly three times that.
As strong as Liz’s stomach was, it began to shed its Kevlar lining by mid-August.
#
One Thursday night about that time in August, Renaldo went ten proverbial rounds with his treatment and the overall symptoms of the cancer.
Violent puking from the chemo.
Bloody coughing fits from the cancer.
Soft-stomached Cynthia, mother not like daughter, got lightheaded.
Nearly collapsed on the floor.
And there was Our Liz, stuck in the middle.
Doing damage control.
Liz clocked maybe two hours of sleep that night.
We, the Restaurant Gods, were tickled fucking pink.
As Rae might say.
Nothing so entertaining as a servant with frayed nerves, ends jangling like funereal bells.
So We decided to make it worse.
Decided to have Friday sit its portly, sadistic derriere on Liz’s face and smother her.
#
During the summer, Friday was the worst day traffic-wise in Lower Slower, The Widowmaker clogged southbound with assholes upon assholes upon assholes.
With a heaping side of assholes.
As Rae might say.
This fact absconded from Liz’s sleep-deprived memory bank, fleeing like a deadbeat from a froth-mouthed bookie.
Thus, instead of leaving early to get ahead of the traffic like she usually did, Liz departed Lewes at her usual time, like it was just another weekday.
Bad for her.
Good for Us, the Restaurant Gods.
We drank in her succulent misery.
Relished every drop of sweat that flowed from her anxious brow.
But We are greedy, you see.
We wanted more.
Thus, on that Friday, when the mercury sizzled its way into the high 90s, We sabotaged the A/C on Liz’s bedraggled Nissan Sentra, drinking in her increasingly briny salinity like ambrosia.
But We aren’t total scumbags.
Once Liz made it to downtown Rehoboth, We granted her the ease of finding a peach of a parking spot, approximately fifty yards from Morganti’s.
Making her only five minutes late instead of fifteen or twenty.
The reprieve was but a short one, though.
You see, Morganti’s was a tiny little restaurant tucked into the first floor of a tiny little boutique hotel.
Poorly ventilated.
Not a window to open.
Add the heat from the kitchen equipment.
Along with several hundred thousand BTUs of body heat from the staff and customers.
And the A/C was taxed worse than the poor, crapping out completely the night before.
We had nothing to do with this.
This was purely a failure of shoddy engineering.
But We still enjoyed it when Liz climbed out of the pot and into the fire.
#
Our other servants at Morganti’s were miserable, too.
Each servant’s mouth exuded unpleasantries of the most profane order.
Rae’s most of all.
“Fucking cunt-ass shithole,” she said as she grated cheese.
“Fucking nothing works around here when you need it to.”
“And now we have to wait on these fucking cunt-ass cuntfaces with their sunburned cunt arms.”
“Motherfucking cunts.”
Liz, listless, dead on her feet, could barely summon the verbal dexterity to utter, “Yeah.”
Didn’t even have the energy to talk about murder.
“And these fucking August people, man,” Rae continued.
“Come in all pissy, and shit on our faces.”
“Fucking shitbags.”
Right then, We blinked, and Rae’s hand slipped, grating her knuckle.
Wasn’t that bad thanks to the two nitrile gloves on her right hand, but…
“Fucking Christ!”
“Can’t we get any of those fucking anti-cut gloves?”
“Motherfucking place sucks!”
Rae yelled, “Door!” and banged through the cowboy doors, hunted in the kitchen for a Band-Aid.
Liz was grateful for the quiet.
Pardon the phrasing.
#
Before working in Lower Slower, Liz hadn’t heard of “the August people.”
(A catchy horror movie title if ever there was one.)
Near the end of every summer, she learned, something happens to people who vacation in Lower Slower in August.
“They lose their fucking minds, is what happens,” Rae explained back in July.
Vacationers in August, their lazy summer days quickly dwindling like grains of sand sifting into the lower bowl of an hourglass like an anachronistic doomsday clock, were none too happy about this.
Thus, when they went out to eat, they were ten times more demanding.
Ten times more entitled.
Ten times bitchier.
As Rae might say.
That Friday, as Liz poured sweat whilst shredding block after sweaty block of cheese, an acute concentration of August people readied itself, like a bacterial plague, to invade and infect Morganti’s with its virulence.
#
One-and-one-half hour into service, We, the Restaurant Gods, took it easy on Liz.
Customers were annoying, yes, but it was nothing Liz couldn’t handle.
She wasn’t double-sat.
Wasn’t triple-sat.
Her customers weren’t so needy that Liz got weeded.
Why, We even allowed Liz to pop into the kitchen from time to time to rehydrate herself.
After all, a calm before the storm was warranted.
Because a storm was coming.
Enter Tavia Covington.
The most reviled.
Most hated.
Most loathed customer in Lower Slower.
She ticked all the boxes We love.
Demanding?
Check.
Entitled?
You betcha.
Always wanted a million modifications to whatever she ordered?
Yup.
She was, in short, Our favorite nightmare.
#
The week previous, Tavia put on quite the show.
She ordered chicken parm, but demanded something that didn’t remotely resemble said dish.
When Liz keyed in Tavia’s order, she typed, “NO CHZ ON CHIX, CREAM SAUCE ON SPAG ONLY, SPAG & CHIX ON SEP PLATES, FUCK TAVIA.”
Tavia also made a point of demanding less salt in her food.
“For health reasons,” whatever those were.
Yet she would pile on a metric ton of pecorino romano, which is so salty, so well-preserved, it could be left out for eight-plus hours, and it’d still taste just fine.
When Tavia received her food, she’d send the server away a million different times with a million different requests.
Fresh-cracked pepper.
Crushed red pepper flakes.
More cheese (read: more salt).
More bread (read: even more salt).
Bring one thing, she’d ask for another.
Ran the servers ragged.
When it was all said and done, she’d leave a 10% tip.
If the server was lucky.
Oh yes, she was great fun to watch.
#
Tavia was to be rotated among the servers.
To spread the misery around so it didn’t always fall on one particular person.
But We couldn’t have that.
Uh-uh.
We wanted Liz saddled with Tavia.
Why?
Because Liz seemed unflappable.
Unbreakable.
Hard as nails.
However you care to put it.
We have seen her endure awful customers like you wouldn’t believe.
Twelve-tops who only order sodas and a few apps, but who sit there for hours, essentially taking money out of her pocket.
Teenagers who order expensive items on their parents’ AmEx and tip next to nothing.
Senior citizens who treat servers like trash because that’s what those crepe-skinned crypt keepers do.
We have seen her deal with all of that and take it on the chin like a boss.
And, well, that didn’t sit well with Us.
We wanted to see her break.
She was Our Achilles, you see.
And We DESPERATELY wanted to cut her heel.
So what did We do?
We had all four tables in Liz’s section empty simultaneously.
And then, because those tables were the only ones available in the entire restaurant at that moment, those tables were all sat at the exact.
Same.
Time.
That’s right.
We quadruple-sat her.
And at one of those tables was none other than Tavia Covington and her alte kaker friends.
Liz’s eyes went wide.
“Oh fuck me,” she muttered to herself.
#
Liz took the abuse like a champ.
Hustled like she always did.
Much to Our chagrin.
Got the tables settled as quickly as she could.
Got them watered.
Got their drinks and apps ordered.
Got bread to all of them.
To add to Our displeasure, Tavia was remarkably well-behaved.
Until Liz went to get Tavia’s entrée order.
Tavia slugged Liz with question after question after question after question after question.
As if she’d never been to Morganti’s before.
As if she hadn’t been there the previous week.
“Is the chicken parm gluten-free?”
“Can I have cream sauce on the spaghetti and meatballs?”
“Is the branzino fried or pan-seared?”
“Is the eggplant in the eggplant parm thick or thin?”
“Can the shrimp arrabbiata be made non-spicy?”
“Is there a meat substitute for the Bolognese?”
“Can they grill the veal Milanese instead of frying it?”
“Can I have the lobster taken out of the lobster bucatini?”
“Is the cacio e pepe made with dairy-free cheese?”
Oh yes, she did not disappoint in the slightest.
Liz, ever so patient, ever so courteous, answered every question without batting an eye.
Even as she felt her other tables stare laser holes into the back of her head.
Even as she felt the dreaded weeds sprout and grope for her.
If the term “weeded” were in the dictionary, its definition would be, “A clusterfuck experienced by servers, the primary symptom of which is a massive time-suck, which is caused by idiot customers who don’t know how to shut the fuck up and let the server do his/her job. Ex. – see Liz’s situation, current.”
When Tavia appeared to be finished, Liz would begin to step away from the table only to be assailed by another one of Tavia’s asinine inquiries.
The other diners, the dreaded August People, could clearly see that Tavia was taking up all of Liz’s time.
Monopolizing it.
But the August People didn’t care about that.
Because, you see, the August People are incapable of empathy.
Or sympathy.
The only emotions they’re capable of feeling are impatience.
Entitlement.
Irritability.
And their irritability was compounded by the heat.
And who better to focus their negativity on than the lowly server?
After all, in their eyes, she was there for them.
She was their server.
Their servant.
One idiot, some gavone retiree from Philly, kept draining his iced tea within minutes just so he could flag Liz down and demand a refill, snapping his fingers at her every time she got close.
Another imbecile, some plasticky, over-lipsticked MILF wannabe from D.C., kept demanding more ice for her pinot noir.
A RED WINE.
Even though she already had two full glasses of ice in front of her.
The worst was when a woman with an unplaceable European accent and three loud, out-of-control children left in a huff after amassing a $200 tab.
In the tip line on the receipt, there was a big fat zero, along with a scrawled note from that piece of Eurotrash that said, “Bad service :(”
The frowny face was emphasized.
When Liz saw Eurotrash’s comment, her breath caught in her throat.
Her eyes welled up with tears.
Then she beelined to the bathroom where she began to sob.
Our servant had finally broken.
We were positively giddy.
#
Liz didn’t believe in Us.
Or any deity.
If asked, she’d state in no uncertain terms that she was an atheist.
She attached no verity to any religious concept.
Felt it was all smoke and mirrors.
So imagine Our surprise when she started praying.
Praying like she’d NEVER prayed before.
To whatever god was listening.
Didn’t even care which one helped her as long as one did.
And fast.
She just wanted her strength back.
Didn’t care how.
#
We weren’t eager to do anything for anyone.
Least of all one of Our servants.
That being said, Liz was something of a special case.
Being an atheist, a total non-believer in any and all deities, Liz didn’t ask Us for a damn thing.
Ever.
As deities who are hounded constantly for all manner of reprieve and assistance, We appreciated and respected Liz’s self-reliance.
Her stiff upper lip.
So when she started crying, when she took off her glasses and mopped delicious tears with swatches of thin, brown paper towel, We, the Restaurant Gods, well.
We felt for her.
And when she, in a rare moment of weakness, implored any cosmic being listening for assistance, We looked at each other, then down at her, and, taking a cue from many a restaurant employee, whispered exactly one syllable.
“Heard.”
Then We gave her more than just strength.
We did her one better.
We made her a god.
#
After just two minutes – eons in server time – Liz wiped her eyes and exited the bathroom.
Just as the sole of her black sneaker with the Dr. Scholl’s insert touched the worn wood of Morganti’s dining room floor, she felt an unusual tingling in her belly.
It wasn’t nausea.
Wasn’t that feeling humans get when they kiss somebody for the first time.
Wasn’t anything that could be mistaken for a grave illness.
That tingling was the lightning of the gods.
Of We, the Restaurant Gods.
Fur began sprouting on her arms, her legs.
Standing there, she could feel the bristles brushing the insides of her jeans.
Itchy.
Hot.
Then her arms and legs began to shrink.
As did her torso.
Her nose elongated.
Her jaws expanded outward while narrowing at the same time.
Her ears began to droop as the cartilage disappeared.
It didn’t hurt.
Truth be told, it tickled.
Tickled so much that Liz would’ve laughed.
That is, if she weren’t so frightened.
So horrified.
The same can be said for the servers and diners in Morganti’s.
Pretty soon, Liz was standing in a puddle of her own clothes.
But the servers and diners, all they saw was a light brown Dachshund wearing glasses.
(The glasses, go figure, managed to stay on during the transformation.)
Standing there, she had no idea what to do.
Until she got the sudden urge to pee.
And right in her eyeline was the very thing she wanted to pee on.
Tavia.
Because much like the metastatic cancer that ravaged the other parts of Renaldo’s body, Tavia was the metastatic tumor that ravaged the other parts of Liz’s section.
This was all her fault.
#
Dachshund Liz dipped her head, and the glasses slipped off her nose and onto the floor.
Then she trotted over to Tavia.
Stared up into Tavia’s confused, judging eyes.
And lifted her leg to pee on Tavia’s.
(Yes, she transmogrified into a male dog.
We work in mysterious ways.)
Tavia flinched, and a small gasp escaped her lips when the yellow stream hit the band of lily-white skin showing below the cuff of her lily-white capri pants.
The pee was warm, wet.
Just like dog pee should be.
When Dachshund Liz finished and lowered her leg, the pee began to burn.
It only burned slightly at first.
Like a mild sunburn.
But then it grew hotter and hotter until it felt even worse than scalding water.
If somebody interviewed Tavia in that moment, she would’ve said it was a billion times worse than the time that “trashy server with the awful tattoos” (Rae) tripped and spilled a tiny droplet of hot coffee – it was Tavia’s fourth refill, and she’d requested a new cup and saucer every time – on her arm.
The pee grew so hot it began to sizzle.
It ate through one layer of Tavia’s skin.
Then another.
And another.
Opened up a wound that exposed the bone.
Tavia screamed.
It was the only sound in the restaurant.
In that moment, Dachshund Liz’s mouth began to water.
She clamped her jaws around the area where she’d marked her territory, just sank her teeth in.
Like she was eating a fat, juicy peach.
Tavia screamed even louder.
The other diners shot up.
Scampered to the other side of the restaurant.
Huddled like nuclear holocaust escapees in a fallout shelter.
Tavia flung herself out of her chair, arms and legs flailing.
She beat at Dachshund Liz with her hand, her purse.
She grabbed a half-empty bottle of wine from a nearby table.
Crashed the punt of it against the canine.
Two-hundred-dollar Amarone sloshed out of the bottle, went everywhere.
Stained tablecloths.
Splashed into plates of rigatoni Bolognese.
Created expensive, maroon puddles on the floor.
The few droplets that landed on Dachshund Liz slid right off, like she was Scotchguarded.
Dachshund Liz held on tight.
Totally unfazed.
Totally unharmed.
In fact, if Liz could’ve spoken at that moment, she would’ve admitted she was having a blast.
Until Tavia grabbed a steak knife off a wayward plate, stabbed at Dachshund Liz with it.
Now, the blade didn’t sink in.
Didn’t penetrate flesh.
It just poked Dachshund Liz’s side as if she were a rubbery cartoon character.
Only thing missing was the boink! boink! boink! sound effect as the knife bounced off Dachshund Liz’s abdomen.
But Dachshund Liz was perturbed by the attempted murder.
So she picked that very moment to crunch through Tavia’s fibula and tibia.
Summarily, Tavia went to ground and then really lost her shit.
As Rae might say.
“HELP ME!” Tavia screamed.
“GET THIS FUCKING MUTT OFF ME!”
“PLEASE!”
“SOMEBODY!”
“CALL 911!”
Of the exactly three diners who went for their cell phones – two went to call 911 while the third attempted to record a video of the scene – all three found that their phones didn’t even power on.
As if a device-specific electromagnetic pulse had taken them all out.
Tavia’s uvula-straining ululating carried on until Dachshund Liz released her leg.
Hopped on Tavia’s chest.
Looked her dead in the eye.
Tavia stopped screaming, but still whimpered.
Tears obliterated her cheap mascara.
Which ran dark tracks through her caked foundation.
Overcome with yet another bout of intestinal distress, Dachshund Liz squatted.
Still staring at Tavia, she dropped a tight little three-coil steamer in the middle of Tavia’s chest.
Right on her breastbone.
It smelled like burning trash.
Maggot-infested roadkill.
Decomposing flesh baking under a Saharan sun.
All of these colorful similes to say, that little pile of excrement smelled like straight-up death.
Just like the urine that streamed from Dachshund Liz’s red rocket, the turd burned like acid.
Ate right through the sky-blue sweater Tavia got for half-price at Talbots, a discount she received only after she bitched a blue streak about the teensy tiny loose thread that was barely visible near where the tag was stitched into the collar.
The brown mound melted its way through the off-white blouse beneath the sweater, the one Tavia borrowed from her sister but “forgot” to return.
The malignant logs plunged downward through flesh and bone, penetrating Tavia’s pericardium. Juuuuuuuust enough to expose her beating heart.
Dachshund Liz peered in, allowed herself a moment to absorb the horror before her.
She expected to be disgusted.
Repulsed.
But all she could feel was hunger.
Bloodthirst.
Before she could stop herself, she licked her chops.
Then jammed her entire snout into Tavia’s chest cavity.
Amid the sounds of violent retching and vomiting the diners and staff suddenly engaged in at the sight of this wretched scene – Rae’s being the loudest, the…wettest – Dachshund Liz had herself a feast.
Literally ate Tavia’s heart out.
#
To Liz, one of the most perplexing things about all those murder documentaries and books and podcasts was that they treated murder like it was something special.
Like it didn’t happen all the time in nature.
But when a lion killed a gazelle, it was Darwinism.
Survival of the fittest.
Just another day on the Serengeti.
Not murder.
Not…gazellicide.
It was just nature.
To Liz, humans were really no different from lions.
More self-aware, yes.
More intelligent, maybe.
But both species were still animals.
And animals killed each other.
To Liz, murder wasn’t necessarily bad.
It was just nature.
So as Tavia Covington, former worst customer ever, heartless proverbially and literally, croaked, Liz felt no compunction about it.
It was just nature.
#
Dachshund Liz hopped off Tavia’s chest, went to Tavia’s feet.
Dachshund Liz’s mouth dropped open, dislocated from the rest of her head.
Her snout pointed to the ceiling while her lower jaw slowly slumped to the floor.
Resembling something akin to a bizarre life-size Pez dispenser.
Dachshund Liz pushed her face forward bulldozer-style until Tavia’s precious Tory Burch flats sat in her gaping gob.
Then Dachshund Liz proceeded to python-swallow Tavia’s corpse inch by inch until it was in her belly.
Though, from the sight of her, it appeared as if she’d swallowed nothing at all.
Once finished, her jaw snapped back into place with the sound of a plucked rubber band.
Head held high, she then trotted to her puddled clothes.
Sat on her haunches in front of them.
She addressed the diners in a voice that sounded remarkably like that of arguably the best actor to ever play James Bond: Mr. Pierce Brosnan.
(It’s futile to question Us, so don’t.)
“If you don’t behave,” she said, “every show will be exactly like the seven-thirty show.”
“Be sure to tip your server.”
Then she lay right on top of her damp black shirt.
Her damp jeans.
Curled into a compact little ovoid.
Closed her eyes.
And went to sleep.
#
When she opened them, she was human again.
Butt naked.
Still curled up.
Still on her pile of clothes.
Everybody staring.
She gasped.
Leapt up.
Grabbed her clothes, her glasses.
Ran for the bathroom.
She dressed as quickly as she could.
Splashed water on her face.
Stared at herself in the mirror.
She wasn’t sure whether she wanted what just happened to be a dream.
Or real.
She inhaled deeply.
Exhaled.
Then returned to the dining room.
#
Liz, always the diligent servant, the diligent server, ignored her staring co-workers.
The staring diners.
She pushed through the cowboy doors.
Went into the kitchen.
Grabbed a broom.
Returned to the dining room.
Started cleaning.
Rae and the other servers, mouths still tasting of vomit and bile, minds working double-time to erase burned-in images with little to no success, took the cue, followed Liz’s lead.
As if they were simply tidying up after a table of messy children.
The diners, totally silent and still in shock, threw wads and wads of cash on their respective tables, left Morganti’s.
As they filed out, a young couple approached the place, hoping to get a table.
They saw the mass exodus, exchanged a look with one another.
They asked a random woman – one of Tavia’s alte kaker friends, actually – what happened, why was everybody leaving.
Tavia’s friend, her face as blaringly white as a noon sun, said, “Nothing.”
“Everything was great.”
“Food, service, everything.”
“It was so good we left a fifty percent tip.”
#
In the weeks that followed, a rumor began to spread.
Well, more like a legend.
While nobody – not the customers, not the servers, nobody at Morganti’s that night – mentioned the incident in specific detail, there was a central message.
And that was: stay away from Morganti’s, it’s where that weirdo works.
The weirdo being Liz.
Morganti’s couldn’t fire her outright.
They knew that could lead to a lawsuit as there were no grounds for dismissal.
No grounds they could talk about in specific detail, that is.
And Liz ignored the millions of hints they dropped about “other opportunities at other restaurants.”
Way she figured it, it wasn’t her fault she turned into a human-eating hellhound.
Thus, business at Morganti’s plummeted.
Shit the bed.
As Rae might say.
Did say, actually.
By the end of September, Liz scrambled for another place to work the dinner shift because Morganti’s shuttered its doors once and forever.
But she couldn’t find another job.
Not in Rehoboth, anyway.
Word had spread, you see.
Even the diner in Lewes, fearing the same fate as Morganti’s, reduced Liz’s breakfast shifts to next to nothing.
And then nothing at all.
They said they were overstaffed, had to make cuts.
Which was a total lie.
Liz had to travel half an hour north to Milford to find a job.
Well, two jobs.
One as a server working the lunch shift at a Grotto Pizza.
And another serving gig working the dinner shift at a Ruby Tuesday.
Neither of which were lucrative.
On a good day, she barely made what she made in one shift at Morganti’s on a bad day.
#
On top of all that, Renaldo and Cynthia died.
Cynthia found Renaldo unresponsive one evening in early November.
Sweaty and bug-eyed, she kept shaking him to wake him up.
Which didn’t help because Renaldo was already dead.
Cynthia had a heart attack in the process, slumping over her husband in their bed.
If Liz had been there, she probably could’ve saved Cynthia.
But she was stuck at Ruby Tuesday late.
And then she got stuck in construction traffic on The Widowmaker coming home.
Liz found her parents thirty minutes after they died.
She was so exhausted she didn’t even have the strength to cry.
Numb, she simply took out her phone, dialed the police, told them what happened.
Didn’t even bother with 911.
Months later, she was back in Atlanta.
Working as a corporate drone somewhere.
Which is something she never wanted.
Which is why she became a server in the first place.
But after everything that happened, she’d had enough.
She was done being Our servant.
#
None of this came as a surprise to Us, the Restaurant Gods.
We envisaged all this, you see.
Knew it would happen just this way.
Which is exactly why We did what We did.
Mind you, We wanted to help Liz.
We really did.
Because, in the end, she was Our servant.
And was deserving of some relief.
But We couldn’t have things end on a high note.
Oh, no.
You see, We, the Restaurants Gods, are fair.
But even more?
Cruel.
Suffering is Our nourishment.
And now Our bellies are full.
END