CHEFS - Tim MacGabhann

Illustration by Ian Craigie // https://www.instagram.com/itsiancraigie

His hair rumpled, his face seamed with pillow-scars, Diego wakes in his hotel-room, awaiting a donut he ordered in his dream, before he remembers where he is, groans, and reaches for the carafe of water the cleaning service left out with a load of mints the same clean white as the room.

High-heeled footsteps clop towards and then past his door. It’s Magda, the director of the poetry course he’s teaching, here in this town an hour south of the city, a pretty tourist town famous for its cave spas and hot springs even back in Prehispanic times.

‘I hope he doesn’t sleep through this thing,’ he hears Magda say. 'Why's he not there?'

‘There is a lot of alcohol there, Magda,’ says her assistant.

‘He’s got two years,’ Magda replies blithely. She's wrong. It's six. But whatever. Either way, he has to be normal now. At the bathroom sink, he sluices the cobwebs from his mouth then stands in his open door, taking in the view of the villa-style hotel's grounds. Glowing with fairy lights, the tunnel of wisteria leads all the way to a big-tiled square, students and faculty and waiting staff milling around. A pyramid of tulip-glasses gleams on the white-covered tables at the back. They have those big traditional jugs of mezcal, but it isn’t that much alcohol, really; he can be around it, as long as he doesn't drink any, he thinks. He slides his feet into espadrilles. He’s slept in what passes for his dress clothes.

All month, he’s been fearing these students. He’s only accidentally a poet. He did an album of cut-and-pastes from notebooks he’d jotted in those years he was on heroin, joined lines together with an algorithm, spilling around enough like the fragmentation of addiction imagined by people who had never been addicted to anything in particular. An art press put out sixty pages of it, which won a prize big enough for people to want him to teach other people how to write poems, even though he doesn’t know how.

He feels his fraudulence giddily, like a heist he’s about to pull off.

After all, he thinks, tidying himself at the mirror, all these students are paying for is hope, to be sent back into the concrete world full of the dream that making stuff can make everything OK.

He leaves the room with a glass of iced water from the carafe so the waiters won’t offer him a wine-glass. This could be the easiest gig of his life, he thinks, walking, munching ice, towards the crowd, his eyes so lost in the veinwork of ivy and wisteria above him that he nearly chest-bounces a woman off the path and into the grass.

‘Oh, shit,’ he says, as she laughs and does a little antelope-totter backwards from him along the gravel path. Clear mezcal splashes from her shot-glass onto the web of her hand. ‘I’m so fucking sorry.’

‘No, that’s fine, honestly.’ She sucks at her hand. She is incredible: it hits him as a sinking of the blood. She has a loose, chiffony dress on. This is awful. He sees the little bone nubs of her shoulders under the straps. He’d like to bite them, run his face down her arm, taste the tongue-drying salt of sweat mixing with deodorant. Girls like that are the kind he could never date before. They smelled too clean next to the sourness of his addiction. Now, though, he has all sorts of ways to conceal this.

‘You’re brave to be out on this in heels,’ he says, because she hasn’t gotten out of his way.

She laughs. She has a slight hunch to her shoulders. She probably got made fun of in school for being too tall.

‘Do you like the hotel?’ she says.

‘Ah, yeah, nice to be anywhere like this, really.’ He points over his shoulder. ‘I’m staying over there.’

‘Oh! Near mine. Room Five. Pool view.’ Her tone of voice has that blank chirpiness to it. Teaching doesn’t start until Monday, so now he’s got two days of knowing where she lives and wondering if he should knock on her door some evening. He can no longer tell if or when anybody is flirting with him. It’s a generational thing. Politeness has made the young so boring; they'll say anything and mean anything for as long as they have to, and all because they're scared. Diego never figured out how to be charming, only apologetic, and now he’s too chippy to be apologetic.

‘Noisy, then, I suppose.’ He clears his throat, looks towards the drinks-table. Now that he really thinks about it, he can’t see any sparkling water anywhere, not even juice.

‘Thankfully no kids around.’ She pauses, looks down at her glass for a second, then says, ‘I just wanted to say how brave your work is.’ She does a little cough-laugh. ‘Or are you tired of people calling your work “brave”?’

Even if this isn’t flirting, he imagines it’d be easy for him to make it – and there’d be two ways it would go then. One: he’d flop around in her admiration of his pain like the Dying Gaul while her own pain grows slowly out of control, which is what happened in his first sober relationship. After it ended, she sent him photos of her naked chest, the space between her breasts pocked red-black from still-smoking cigarette-burns, the caption read, ‘I am trying to burn you out of me and it will not work.’ Or, the other way would be boring her off him. Honesty, open-mindedness and willingness: with these we are well on our way. That’s what they say at the beginnings of Narcotics Anonymous meetings. He can do the first one, he supposes.

‘A little bit, yes,’ Diego says to her. ‘Sorry.’

‘Oh.’

‘That’s alright,’ he says, even though she didn’t apologise. He leans against one of the posts holding up the wisteria, puts a hand through his hair. ‘See, I try to destroy everything I write. Every couple of months. I tell myself, “This is it, done”. But the words keep seeping up, don’t they, a black leak from who knows what cut inside me, drip, drip, drip, filling me up until I've got to drain it out.’ He scratches under his chin. She has taken another step back. ‘I’d like to see what would be there if I was ever able to drain it all out entirely, and then shut up – “a rugged bed of stone the colour of rust, scarred and porous, littered with bright grit”.’ He’s quoting himself. He waits for that to sink in. He’s not sure if it does. He keeps going. ‘So we’ll try to get you to that stage, I guess, won’t we? So that we can all enjoy the silence.’

‘I see. Well. Thanks,’ she says. She’s gripping the elbow of her arm holding the shot-glass. ‘And how are you feeling about the course and stuff?’ A note of doubt has crept into her voice. She is digging at the gravel with the point of her toe. Why can’t people just excuse themselves and go? But she has that politeness virus. The young never shake it off, not until they’re forty, or sober, whichever happens first. But it’s the first event of the course. He indulges her.

‘I’m feeling good about it.’ He hooks out a chunk of ice with his finger. A dribble of water goes down the side of his glass. He watches her watching this. ‘I remember this one guy in my Narcotics Anonymous group.’ He watches her reaction. ‘A director. Talked about working on a fellowship in Colorado. Lost grip of himself entirely, wound up flaking LSD into himself, a shock-blanket around him, punching holes in the plaster to let the voices out of the room’ – Diego’s finger waggles in the air – ‘“and all,” the director said, running a hand over his shaved scalp, “all because I couldn’t face prepping for one simple lecture” – which wasn’t even that funny a line, but it hit like a punchline, you know? The chuckles around the room bubbling over into full-on laughter.’ He sweeps his hand in an arc, tracing the shape of the room. She steps back.

‘Yeah.’ He scratches his nose. ‘So, you know, as long as nothing like that happens to me this weekend, we’ll be alright, won’t we?’ His laugh sounds like a fox’s bark. He gives her a matey pat on the shoulder, hears the flat smack of his palm on her skin. ‘Excuse me, won’t you? Better get a drink. I’ll see you in class.’ Then he’s past her, eyes already scanning for a waiter holding anything that won’t total his recovery.

He looks at the crowd for a minute, bodies unknotting in the warmth of the first couple of drinks, carillons of laughter rising up brightly towards the clouds of mosquitos and the puttering flames of the outdoor heaters. At things like this in the needle years he would totter about, saying, ‘Right, right, right’ no matter what was said. A solution to all his social problems – until, of course it caused every other kind of problem.

A male student he's not yet spoken to – bearded, with an undercut and one of those long flops of hair that Diego always finds vaguely fascistic – breezes past him, waving over his shoulder at him. The trays of drinks are loaded – sweating bottles of beer in ice-buckets, massed flutes of champagne, brimming shots of mezcal as clear as eyes. The terrace is starting to feel like a bad idea. He looks around for an alternative. Magda, the director, is talking to a camera-crew over by the pool. The mike boom makes Diego think of the fluffy antennae of a moth budging after food or light. He watches too long: the assistant, Gaby, catches his eye and waves at him to come over.

‘Oh, fuck,’ he says around the ice, but smiles, and returns her wave with a pinch of the fingers that’s meant to say, ‘Just a minute’.

The UNAM channel is filming interviews with everyone. There he was, thinking he had only one job – not to have a drink – and now fate’s dumped this shit in his lap hasn’t it.

But while Gaby watches Magda, Diego slips into the shadows. The wet grass tickles his ankles. Gleeful at escaping, he moves under the palapa and into the cool of the gym-room. The smell of rice-paper is a surprise but when his eyes adjust to the dimness he sees there’s a small library here, faded encyclopedias and tattered paperbacks and old copies of National Geographic, with wingbacked pink velvet armchairs and little Tlaloc statues on lit plinths arranged around a low table the colour of a coffin. It’s nice though. He likes it. He could curl up here and pretend he’d forgotten the interview, pretend even he’d been absorbed in chat with that student. It wouldn’t quite be a lie.

The upstairs light is on. Motes twine above the spiral stairs. He climbs them, up to an attic where a pool-table stands under a perfect box of golden light, giving off that funeral smell of new varnish. A cue clacks as he draws it from the slot, and he lays out the balls in a loose pyramid, shapes them tighter with a jiggle of the triangular rack against the baize.

Diego takes a swig and rolls an ice-flake along the wall of his mouth. Each ball thunks against the bank and lands with a hiss in the netted pockets and he can nearly hear his father's exclamation. He doesn’t remember his father ever going to a cantina, or a pool-hall, or even drinking at home. Diego’s father was a mechanic who specialised in Scania trucks, which took him all over northern Mexico during the week, but he was always back by Friday evening to see Diego and Teresa. When Teresa was twelve and Diego was ten, on a job at a small garage in Zacatecas, something went wrong with the lift-table and the cabin of a truck fell right on top of him. Death would have come so fast that Diego believed his father still hasn’t even realised he’s dead, imagines him returning to the workshop in their garage, imagining some version of this resurrection in his head for almost thirty years.

Downstairs, the door clicks open. He stands up, rigid, the cue like a spear. Maybe he’s had enough time up here to steel himself for the interview, but he knows he hasn’t: there’s a flutter in his chest still like moths in a bell-jar. Something blocks the light downstairs: he sees the shadow of a hand flip the shadow of longish hair, he hears a sniff, and his fear heats into anger. Footsteps begin to climb the spiral stairs. Diego looks down and sees the young man, two beer-bottles sweating in his grip and his hands tighten on the pool-cue.

‘Hey, man,’ says the young man, giving Diego a nod, his cigarette and casual gesture utterly undercut by his eyes, the ripple in his voice. ‘Brought you a drink.’ He proffers one of the beers. Diego feels the hard, tight anger thrumming across his chest. Threads of smoke fray up and reknit opaque across the cone of light over the baize. The smell brings back the taste of parties where he’d huff down lines as long as this pool-table.

The young man is walking towards him, shaking his head, saying, ‘Man, you have so many crazy stories. I can’t wait to hear them.’

Diego takes the beer with a numb hand. A ray of cold radiates from the skin of his face. He can’t even feel the beer in his grip. Diego slides the cue back into its hole at the end of his table. He takes a step forward, his breath hissing like steam. The kid gives an awkward laugh and takes a step back so that he’s nearly teetering on the edge of the stairs. This makes him laugh again.

‘Hey, whoa, now,’ he begins to say, but then Diego is gripping a fistful of his black scoop-neck t-shirt.

‘Cunt,’ says Diego, and tips the beer down the kid’s shirt. Beer glugs out, foaming in the kid’s chest-hairs. ‘Cunt,’ says Diego again. ‘Cunt, cunt, cunt.’

‘Oh, what the fuck, man?’ the kid yowls, clutching his soaked t-shirt, staring at it. Diego moves him out of the way, drops the bottle and shoves the kid to the carpeted ground behind him.

‘Are you fucking crazy?’

Diego looks over his shoulder from the turn in the spiral, and says, ‘Yes. Yes, I am.’

Downstairs, he runs across the floor, back into the dark. The terrace would be the first place that soaked idiot would look for him. Towards the pool, where the camera-crew are craning around, Magda and Gaby are on the path towards his room. He feels a groan begin in his chest, because the only other route he can see is to his car parked by the open gate. It’s not even a decision: his legs are pumping him over the grass, the rhythm as monotonous as the glugging beer or the ‘Cunt, cunt, cunt’. He gets in, slams the door, and looks back up at the pool hall. He sees his father lifting him through the dim light, hears again the clack of the balls, his laughing. He will drive back there – all the way to Aguascalientes, their childhood home. He starts the car, whips it around in a crunching rooster-tail of pebbles. The kid is already running across the grass towards him, his face aghast.

‘Shit, man,’ he’s saying. ‘I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I thought you could have just one beer.’

Diego lowers the window. He puts his hand out. He raises his middle finger, turning it in the air behind him as he drives out of the gate and onto the grey track of the country road that corkscrews north to Mexico City and beyond.

*

It’s after eleven and thickly dark by the time Diego gets into Zacatecas, a lacquer of muck crunching under the tyres of his jeep. He slows past the shuttered machine-shops and grocery-stores, his eyes moving back and forth between the windscreen and the red tangle of the map-line on his GPS, so that the sudden yellow crackle of fireworks startles him, and he’s certain – momentarily – they’ve been let off for him. Then he sees the bunting above the streets, the golden bell-shaped LEDs on the fronts of the buildings, and he remembers it’s Independence Day.

Diego eases his car along the last snarls of the route, down the second-last turn before the garage and feels his heart flip slowly over. He doesn’t know if the family will want to see him, if they still live there in fact, or even if they’re still alive. He’s looked at this sign on Street View countless times. It should be more monumental, he thinks, as he pulls in between a white Honda jeep and a little orange Suzuki Swift, feeling the nervousness die a little, replaced by disappointment.

He gets out, and hears laughter and a Los Ángeles Azules song filtering down from the lit upstairs window above the garage. Just remembering all those claustrophobic family gatherings gives him a heavy, glassy feeling. Tiny shadows screech across the glass. He has no idea how to be around kids: they make him all snippy and abrupt, like a cop, while crouching down to their height makes him feel even more like a cop. If I have to deal with kids during this thing I am finished, he says to himself, walking towards the door and pressing the buzzer. The walls and windows are so thin he hears a new thunder of feet and adult voices now, before the window scrapes up.

‘Can I help you?’ says a man’s voice.

Diego steps back from the shutters into his line of sight, then waves. Words are a curdled mass in his throat. He’s imagined dozens of versions of this moment during the drive here, but now he can’t call up a single one. The guy at the window doesn’t look like who he’d imagined either – he’s hefty, in need of a shave, the little spikes of his thinning hair crisp as the skin of a toffee-apple, and he doesn’t look friendly. He’d imagined someone humble and soft-spoken, who’d remember everything in an instant.

Diego sucks in a breath.

‘If you’re selling something, we don’t want it,’ the guy says. ‘It’s a family night, you know?’

‘I realise that,’ Diego says. ‘That’s sort of why I drove up.’ He nods at the shutter. ‘My father worked here.’

The guy’s brow gets lines and an edge comes into his voice, ‘And we owe him money or what?’

‘Well, no, nobody owes him anything, really,’ Diego says. ‘He’s dead.’

‘Oh.’ Diego sees his fingers tap against the rim of the beer-can he’s holding, then the guy says, ‘Sorry for your loss’, in the same voice he might have said, ‘So what?’

‘He worked for Scania,’ Diego says. ‘It was a one-off.’

The guy at the window takes a deep breath in and out, then he nods.

‘Right,’ he says. ‘OK. I think I remember something like this.’

Diego nods. The guy must be what, five, six years older than him – old enough to have maybe been working alongside his father or uncle or whatever back in the day when the truck fell on him.

‘Who is it, love?’ says a woman’s voice from inside.

‘I’ll be back in a minute, alright?’ the guy says. He looks down at Diego. He taps the can, then rubs the heel of his hand against his cheek, before at last he says, ‘Let me go in and talk to my father for a second.’

‘Yeah, sure,’ Diego says, but the window slams down before he can get to the end of the sentence. It’s just him and the buzzing of the streetlight and the mucky dark of the street. All the other ways he could have done this differently are churning around and around, though every other one he thinks of is also crap. He opens the app with the NA meeting schedules and tries to see one he can find straight after this. What is it he wants to see here, anyway – a dim room walled in posters of girls in bikinis and old football teams, a smell of oil, a liftgate that may or may not have been replaced since the early ‘90s?

From inside he hears the man talking, the woman’s reticence. Diego already knows how it’s going to be, when the window goes back up and the guy says, ‘Sorry about this, but it’s a family occasion. You know? A special night. So if you could just—’

‘Right,’ says Diego. ‘Right. Yeah. No problem. I get it. And sorry. You know?’

‘Sure.’ The window goes down a second time. The footsteps thud away. The kids start up yelling and screeching almost immediately and he hears the man laugh. A dark flare of anger spreads like magma through his lower stomach. If he had gone in, he'd only have tried to wreck their night so he walks away before he can think too hard about it.

The app says there’s a meeting starting in ten minutes, so he gets in the car and drives the few streets over. In early sobriety, taquerías used to feel the way meeting rooms do now – little lighthouses in the dark – so there’s a sad jab under the ribs when he drives over there, gets out, and finds the shutters down.

From behind him, halfway up the block, he hears an old man’s voice shout, ‘General Custer, the Fifth Battalion salutes you!’ and he turns to see an old couple sitting on a couch in a grocery shop with barely any front and sides to it, just concrete columns covered in chipped red paint. They have blankets over their knees against the cold, their TV showing the sodden crowd of people waiting grimly for the grito in front of the Palacio Nacional. The palace is lit up green and white and red and so's the crowd. The few gaps of space on the Zócalo are slicked to an ice-rink shine by the rain tipping down. The old couple have a steaming clay cauldron of café de olla going, next to a plastic tray of conchas and croissants and cream-puffs.

‘I told you it wasn’t him,’ one of the old women says, stopping her knitting to jab the man who shouted.

‘Sorry,’ the old man says, raising a hand. ‘We thought you’d just been by. Was just a guy who looked like you.’

'Could have been twins,' said the old woman, then tutted.

'Think he was looking for the meeting,’ said the old man says, with a backward nod. ‘But they don’t open on holidays.’

‘Oh, it’s OK,’ he says, looking at the shuttered meeting-room, scratching his chin. He has a raw, deflated sort of ache in his chest. It’s not that he wants to use. He just wants to talk, and not on the phone – he might like a hug afterwards, he doesn’t know, and, besides, Adonai’s been so grumpy lately.

The old woman who had been knitting is already starting to get up, lifting the blanket from her knees, dusting fluff from the velour of her tracksuit bottoms. ‘Croissant, concha, what do you feel like?’ she says.

‘Whatever's going, honestly,’ Diego says, and accepts a little clay cup and a concha in a napkin.

‘You don’t want cream on that lovely moustache,’ she says, then sits back down to watch the president waving to the big crowds on the Zócalo.

Diego stands on the edge of the light, munching and dunking while the new president goes through the motions. They change the channel to the football highlights, the volume up so loud that they don’t hear Diego thank them or lay his emptied cup down on the tiles.

Getting back into the car, Diego checks the time on his phone. If he pushes it, he can be at his mother’s house in Aguascalientes before midnight, but he’ll need something stronger than that café de olla to get him through, and pulls in at a convenience store. Diego gets out, stretches the tension out of his legs then looks over the railing. Here he sees a huge square lot like a prison-yard – teeming with drizzle under the hard white glare of security lights – full of lifesize plaster chefs. They are holding pizzas, gesturing to invisible customers, toting blank blackboards, their hats wobbly and full like raw white dough being tossed while they whisk or taste or chop vegetables – for a moment he loves them almost, the melted, earnest tenderness of their eyes, their unguarded smiles.

Diego is leaning on the railing now, balancing on his hands, when headlights flash twice and a car horn beeps.

He turns from the railing to see a huge jeep pulling in further up the road. The window is down, and Diego hears a voice say, ‘Oh, thank God’ in strangely-accented Spanish.

‘I wasn’t about to jump,’ he says, dropping back onto his feet. ‘Sorry, sorry.’

The guy at the window frowns and says, ‘What? No. I thought I’d lost you.’

Diego takes a step back. He feels a crawl of dread.

‘You were following me?’ he says. He checks the distance between himself and the car. Could he sprint it?

‘Not quite, no.’ The guy in the jeep takes a cigarette out of a pack and lights up with a Zippo. ‘I was looking for the meeting. But it was shuttered. When I went past the place again those old people told me my twin had also been by. They said you’d taken the Aguascalientes road. So I drove this way and, boom’ – he lifts and drops his hand – ‘here’s my twin.’ The driver’s Spanish is good, but it's not his first language. He doesn’t flatten the words out the way US people do, but the slipped-gear noise of the ‘j’ could make him German or Dutch or something.

The driver squints at Diego and says, ‘And, you know, facial hair aside, I’m not sure we even look that much alike.’ The man tilts his head back against the car-seat and takes a no-handed suck of smoke, then billows it out with a big sigh of relief, saying ‘And frankly, chief, it would have been less weird if I hadn’t pulled in. What’s the twelfth step say?’

Diego scrapes his foot against the gravel and says, ‘Yeah, alright’, because this is the second-least strange and unpleasant thing to happen to him all day.

‘We could smash a coffee in there,’ the driver says, waving his cigarette at the convenience store. There’s a hint of Central America in the accent, too, Diego hears now, and he can’t help asking, ‘Where’d you learn your Spanish?’

‘I used to live here,’ the driver says. ‘Mexico City. Now I don’t really know where I live. I just drive around. Doing jobs.’

‘What kind?’ Diego says, then wishes he hadn’t, only then noticing the licence-plate says HONDURAS, which is when the driver laughs and says, ‘What kind do you think?’

‘Tourism,’ Diego says quickly.

‘Good answer,’ the driver says, blowing out more smoke. ‘How much clean time you got?’

‘Like six years?’

The driver nods and says, ‘Same.’ He shrugs. ‘Well. More or less.’

He turns off the ignition, puts up the window, then gets out of the car. ‘Jesus,’ he says, hugging his arms, even though he has a thick jacket on, one of those tan leather ones in old detective films. ‘They’re not lying, are they? Zacatecas is the coldest fucking state in the country.’

The driver gets his phone out and swipes the screen unlocked, the cigarette bobbing between his lips. ‘I’ve got it all here – the Just for Today reading, the meeting protocols, all that. It’s going to be quiet in there.’ He juts his chin at the convenience store. ‘What do you think? Do a meeting?’

‘Good with me,’ Diego says, his eyes moving towards the chefs in the lot at the bottom of the slope. Fuzzy halos of raindrops shine above them, rain pearling on their faces though he can’t feel a drop. ‘Be there in a second, OK? Just want to stretch the legs.’

‘Yeah, man, no problem.’ The driver sucks down the last of his cigarette in a single drag, before flicking the dying comet into the highway. ‘What coffee you want?’ he says, already walking across to the automatic doors.

‘Oh, whatever’s fine, honestly. I’ll follow you in. Just give me a minute.’

‘Cool.’

The doors ping open and shut behind the driver. Diego goes back to leaning against the railing, the metal cool against the palms of his hands, lifts himself up off his feet. After a while, the rain cuts through the warm numbness and he crosses the forecourt and goes through the automatic doors. The driver’s already sitting at a plastic table beside the hot drinks section, near a couple of truckers.

‘It tastes kind of like tyre,’ the driver says, holding out a black coffee.

‘That’s how you know the coffee’s efficient.’

‘Yeah.’ The driver pops open a bag of mini-donuts and tilts it towards Diego, then swipes his phone unlocked. ‘You want to kick us off there?’

‘Cool.’ Diego clears his throat, takes the phone, and says, ‘My name is Diego, and I’m an addict. This is a meeting of the Two Fucking Orphans in a Random 7/11 Group of Narcotics Anonymous.’

Scanners beep. The doors ping. Draughts chase around Diego’s ankles. It’s too cold to be walking around in espadrilles in Zacatecas. Forecourt smell blows in, and he thinks of his father’s old workshop – that dark breath of oil, metal with maybe the ghost of soap and wool, too.

Diego gets to the end of his reading, says, ‘Could someone please read “Who is an Addict?”’ In the second before the driver begins to read from the screen of his phone, Diego thinks of his father moving about in the half-dark, a warm gone smile on his face as he tries to sing to the Beatles-hour on Radio Universal.

‘You tripping out on me there, broseph?’ the driver says.

‘Oh, shit. Sorry. Yeah.’ Diego opens his eyes.

He’ll stop and look at that workshop before he goes to bed, he decides. His mother won’t hear a thing.

‘My name’s Andrew, and I’m an addict,’ says the driver, clearing his throat. Then he begins to read from the glowing screen of his phone, and Diego begins to listen.

He thinks of the stupid, heroic absorption of the chefs’ smiles: was he so moved by that kitsch trash all of a sudden? He is – a little, maybe – his eyes smarting, his smile that of an idiot or an actor in a telecom ad. His moustache is beginning to look like those chef's moustaches. He huffs a laugh out through his nose, because these chefs seem to him for a moment poignant somehow, exemplary. They look like they're good at something.

---

Tim MacGabhann is the author of the novels Call Him Mine (2019) and How to Be Nowhere (2020), the memoir The Black Pool (2025), the short story collection Saints (2025), from which this story is taken, and the poetry collection Found in a Context of Destruction (2026). Short Fiction readers can get 20% off Saints if buying from its publishers, Scratch Books - just enter the code STORY20 at checkout!