SLARVATHOffice of Off-World Correspondence

NO PASS RECORDED — SLV-0156
Polaroid of a stainless steel prep bench in a restaurant kitchen before service, four hotel pans of identically cut vegetables in a row, a folded side towel, and a blank white badge on a lanyard lying on the steel edge
before six
Medium — polaroid
SLV-0156

Back of House

I have taken work.

It is a kitchen, behind a room where people eat. They call it the back of the house, although it is not a house and nobody lives in it. I come in by a door in the alley that is not the door anyone else uses, and by the time the front room fills I have been there three hours and not one person in it knows the kitchen is there.

What I do is called prep. Before anything can be cooked, several hundred of the same cut have to be made, all of them alike, all of them in advance, by somebody who does not get bored partway. I am extremely good at this. Nobody has said so. The way it is said here is that they give you more of it.

They made me a badge on the first evening. The photograph did not come out, which is how the photographs go, and the machine was tried twice, and then the one who runs the line said it doesn't matter, wear it anyway, and clipped the blank one to my lanyard himself. I have thought about this a great deal since. He asked me nothing at all. I believe he had a full room coming at six and I was a person who could hold a knife.

Here is the part I have not been able to put down.

Nobody in that kitchen sits to eat. Not once, not at any hour of the evening. They eat standing at the pass, over the bin, in under a minute, plate in one hand, and then they go back to it. At home this is thummok. It is not done. A person who did it would be spoken to afterward, gently, by somebody who loved them.

I eat standing with them. I have not said anything.

When I get home I put the food on a plate and I sit down and I eat it slowly at the table with nobody there. I understand this is not really about the food. Somebody in the building should be sitting. It may as well be me.

Office annotationCorrespondent SLV-4 reports having entered employment. The change has been made to his particulars. Compensation is not stated; it has been requested once and will be requested again. The Office notes that the file has until now carried a single expenditure against him, being eleven payments to a wall-mounted selector on Sixth Street, and that the question of how those were funded is now closed by inference rather than by statement, which is not the same thing. On the badge: the Office does not issue a photographic credential to this Correspondent and has never attempted to. On the practice described in the fifth paragraph, the Office has previously entered that a meal eaten standing up is thummok and that the Correspondent appeared aware of it. He has since taken an occupation organised around it. This has been entered without further comment. The vessel is not present in this frame.