Work Text:
Flick.
The lights in the kitchen turned on bulb by bulb, sleepy eyelids opening, the grit still sticky. Its newborn yawn never made it past the throat, struck down by the darkness outside. The sky was striped with sickly fluorescence.
Sara hung her bag on the hook by the door, canvas tensing, as close to humming as her reserved self could get, some haunting classic barely escaping between the skin flaking from her lips.
(Balm hid it well but she unmistakably bit them as she worked.)
One of her hems had unrolled during transport; she rolled it back till the creases matched, elbows struggling to show.
As she walked to her station, apron now tied, thoughts rolled in with the tempo of her black-loafered gait.
New week. New customers. Same pressure. Same honour to uphold. Same name on the line.
"Lidagat. Binondo's most prized possession: a renowned restaurant marshalled by the greatest tongues of the Western Pacific."
(Yeah, Sara didn't appreciate the wording of the article either, as helpful as it was for their publicity.)
She pressed her hands on the marble counter, inspecting. She appreciated coming back to a pristine, if lifeless, workplace. It had no character and she didn't need it to - simply for everything to stay in the spots she left them in the day before.
The only thing she let be personalized was her uniform: two slits at the shoulders.
Her eyes roved as if she were looking at a map. Though invisible, she actually was - strategizing her dishes for the day, how to avoid what she did wrong yesterday. Because she always did something wrong, even if no one told her; she always felt like something was missing.
The wooden knife block, newly oiled, stared back at her, challenging the knife in her pocket, merciless unlike the rest of her white-lidded mélange of a pantry. She paid no mind to either, diverting her focus, instead, to the book lying unsuspectingly to her right. She propped it up and cracked it open to today's special.
The recipe called for an ingredient she hadn't heard of before. The dish was launched two days ago but since it wasn't hers this time, she hadn't had time to trial it. Nothing similar from English or Tagalog even remotely came to mind. The sudden panic and subsequent underlying curiosity brought her back to her early days, when she still hadn't heard of anything on the list, let alone where to find it, only that she wanted to work with it.
Now, she knew at least to check the Reserves.
The merging corridor practically sucked her in the moment she stepped foot on the tiles; she hadn't been here in a while, perhaps the beginning of last season, and for a spare, so it's possible it missed her just as much as she missed it. She felt a bit like an adventurer each time she entered the walkway, on the brink of discovery, as if she were the one hunting out in the seas. The fantasy always shattered when she saw the rows of steel containers, mildly annoying in their familiarity.
The end of the hallway was alit.
Sara didn't know who could've left the lights on yesterday; she didn't even know the end had electricity, it was so far away and she'd never heard of anything being stored past the shelves.
She stood on the same floor tile for longer than she ever has in the kitchen.
She should've just started at the first box as usual: looked at the label, searched for the weird new name she memorized, continued if she didn't find it. But it was still early, and Sara was still adventuring. She needed to see the end. She walked and walked, betraying her corridor, betraying her boxes, betraying her routine, until she met the artificial horizon. Turning right, her feet refused to move a single step farther.
A tank. Full of water.
And a mermaid looking straight at Sara.
The green of the ferns mixed with the blue reflected off Sara's brown skin in a solemn silver. The creature had a murky, pearlescent aura, growing darker towards her caudal fin in a smooth gradient. It matched the indigo of her hair, long and rippled unlike Sara’s chopped umber. Her eyes were golden, twin eagle beaks, with ears and lashes webbed as wide as the tip of her tail.
There was no other sound apart from the murmur of bubbles at the top right corner of the aquarium, by the ladder.
Sara’s legs finally resuscitated and she climbed up the rungs (the mermaid following in her peripheral vision), towards the only label she could find on the glass.
Sirena. And past it, another word. Sara knew what it said before she read it.
--
she was gorgeous
a tide, unmoving, a feat
against nature
the hand pulling towards the blade's edge, past the
worn handle in the apron starched
did it mistake the sharpness for her scales?
a cutting board of my desires,
hashed by onion slick and meat paste
salting the wounds
she was my intrusive thought
like wanting to drown just to
see shipwrecks below
up close
but it was only her
her eyes
someone's forgotten pocket mirror
glinting in the sun, in the waves
after all this time, blinding me