Buried

Only between the hours of 2 and 4 pm, those awkward hours between the lunch and dinner rush, am I able to engage in my favorite pastime. The doors haven’t swung with the echo of departing customers in at least an hour. I’ve done my tasks. I’ve cut my limes into wedges and lemons into slices. I’ve polished countless wineglasses. There is no one to watch me, or to tell me to get back to my job. I can stand in front of the ice well, shifting side to side on my aching feet, and stab at the ice with my scoop.

I chip away at the cubes. The ice machine spits them out in sheets, perfect, slick, shiny. Long divots crosshatch their surface, making it easy to smash them into neat cubes. In my well, only the stubborn pieces stick together in chunks. When I hit the ice at the perfect angle, little pricks of cold spring from the crack and land on my cheeks. There’s a purpose in it, reaching the bottom, reaching something.

The pub was hot during the lunch rush. I smiled at everyone, willing them not to see the sweat beading on my forehead, on my upper lip. Now the ice is a salve. I want to stick my hand in, twist my fingers into the crevices and leave them there, let it get cold and numb, keep going until I find what is hidden at the bottom.

Every morning, I go to the machine in the back that makes the ice, scoop as much as I can carry into a bucket, take it back to the well. The machine whirs, always active, always full. I can never scoop enough to discover the bottom. 

Once one of my coworkers commented, “There could be a dead body at the bottom, and none of us would know.”

I think about that a lot. I wish I could know for sure, that I could dive in, swallowed by ice, swallowed by that sensation of being so cold that it feels hot. Maybe then the body would be me. Dead. Preserved in the freezing ice. At least that would mean there was something there.

There is a pointlessness to my determined digging that I always ignore. There is something there. I know it. I can prove it. Even when the metal of my scoop hits the bottom of the ice well, I think I can go deeper. I need a drill. Sometimes, I feel like I don’t exist. Standing over the ice well. Standing in this pub. My face is not a face, it’s a smooth fleshy mass. I was a human child once, but now I’m something else. Something that cannot leave, my shoes sticking to the bar mats that I’m meant to clean, a mix of spillage, sweet lime cordial, and sodas and spirits.

It’s strange to be a thing that can remember its humanity. The warmth used to feel good, when I laid on my back on the hot sand at the beach, the sun beating down on my face, the sky a pale blue, the confectionary dots of white clouds. The fine grains under my fingers as I buried them deeper. I could almost sink in. When I tired of looking up, I tilted my chin downwards, fixed my gaze on the ground.

Drew an X with my finger, the lines shaky, imprecise.

X marks the spot. The spot, the buried treasure, the things just waiting to be found under the surface. I would dig furiously, both hands pulling up sand, feeling the grittiness of it between my teeth, watching the sweet gold of the sun warmed sand transition into something darker, colder, wetter. Fistfuls that once slipped effortlessly through my fingers, no matter how tight I tried to hold on, becoming firmer shapes.

It was easy to imagine myself doing that for my entire life. The joy, the anticipation coursing through my body, straight to my fingertips. I would find something. A pot of gold to make me rich, a map to send me on an adventure, never-discovered fossils that would rocket me to archeological fame.

Then the amorphous future that lay ahead slipped away, fantasies going stale and hardening into the concrete present. 

Now I just want to be cold.

The scoop buries itself pointlessly in the ice. It’s useless, not when my hands could do better. Could grip, squeeze, sink in and feel the sharp stab of the broken edges I’ve been breaking. If I pretend, it looks a little like glass. When I press my palms to the ice, it feels like glass too. Not so transparent, not so perfect.

The warmth of my hands melts the ice imperceptibly. It’s wet. The further I plunge, the harder it is to stop. I attack the ice with a ferocity that flings cubes around, behind me, in front. The initial sting of glass is gone. It feels right to feel nothing, and keep going. I do not have hands. They’re not meant for pouring beers and shots and mixing glasses of lemon lime bitters and pink lemonades. All they can do is search.

The ice is past my wrists, creeping up my forearms. Cubed canyons of clear and white parting their way for me. My fingertips brush something hard, unyielding, and I press on. I hunch myself over the ice well, curved over, shoulders tense, hair slipping from a braid and reaching down in tendrils. The pain is back as I jam my fingers against the bottom. I pull back, and slam my hands down as hard as I can, making a clatter and rattle of ice

A pink red blooms in the ice, like I’ve poured raspberry cordial into the well by mistake.

“Excuse me?”

It’s a woman, my age, her brow furrowed. 

I yank my hands out, still gripping fistfuls of jagged ice, pressing sharp pins of a numbing chill into the raw flesh of my palms.

“What can I get for you?” I ask.

I drop the fistfuls of ice to the floor, and they scatter on the ground, before clasping my hands behind my back, twisting my reddened fingers together. She stares at me. I smile.