“You probably think
working in a chocolate factory is the best job in the world. It's
really not. You don't get free samples or anything, you're not
allowed to touch the product except with utensils which you have to
clean every three seconds. It's mostly just staring at a conveyor
belt of other people's happiness...Well maybe that's a bit
over-dramatic, I just meant it gets old really quick.
All this stuff is
becoming automated anyway. If it wasn't for our manager getting off
on the mass slave labour we'd have probably been replaced
already...Heh, some of us joke that he's a medieval torturer
reincarnated, just give him the big black hood and he'd fit right
in...Um...So yeah it's really not all that interesting but thanks for
asking...”
“Oh no, I'm totally interested, I'd love to hear more.”
“Uh...Well okay, I
guess. There's different sections obviously, a pretty huge place,
I've never even seen guys on the far sections...I work with fudge
mainly, dividing the larger clumps into smaller ones...That's kind of
it really...Are you sure you don't want to talk about something else?
Like, what kind of music do you like? I'm a pretty okay guitar
player.”
Darren slides his glass
left and right on the table, sloshing the tiny melted shards of ice
cube around in his drink. He gulps and brushes
his scruffy dirt coloured fringe out of his eyes looking back up at the young woman opposite him. She rests her
head on her hand staring over at the toilets at the far side of the
club. She tucks her long chestnut hair behind her ear and pulls the
strap of her dress back up onto her shoulder.
Darren considers the
possibility that he is perhaps the most boring man to ever dare to
enter a nightclub. The door to the male toilets swings open and and a
tall, muscular Adonis strides out into the flashing strobe lights. He
might have just taken the most ungodly shit in there, leaving all the
other men as twisted suffocated husks on the floor but no one thinks
about that. People mainly think about what's directly in front of
their eyes and potentially their genitals.
Tired enough to drop
the charade, Darren slumps into his seat and mumbles into the hand
holding his chin as he joins the woman's stare at the lithe slab of
man meat eyeing up the women on the dance-floor.
“Is that your
boyfriend then?” The woman makes a rotating hand gesture with her
wrist trying to prompt further unheard monologues unaware that the
conversation has long since died. She eventually registers the
silence.
“Huh?”
“I said, is that guy
your boyfriend?”
“Not yet.” The
woman smiles probably for the first time in their interaction and
downs her drink. As she stands from the bar stool, Darren feels a
desperate energy to attempt one last gambit at convincing her to
stay.
“Can I get you
another drink?”
“Nah, I'm good.”
“How about your phone
number?”
“Look I just wanted
to avoid getting pestered while I waited for him to come back. Don't
you now pester me, I'm not interested in a literal fudge packer.”
She scoffs at verbalising the very idea and struts out into the crowd
suddenly more alive than she acted throughout their entire strained
parley.
The dwindling shards of
ice cube have now completely melted into the dark vodka and coke
mixture Darren was nursing. He watches the woman leave for a few
seconds, grimacing under the worthless wording of a weary and
familiar rebuttal.
“I'm a fudge slicer,
not a packer.”
He downs his own drink
and pours the remaining drips of icy water onto his palm not
unprepared for them to immediately hiss and evaporate into steam.
They instead tediously sit in the lines and creases of his hand
before he wipes the hand across his brow. Darren's solitude is
interrupted by the return of the woman. There is but a split-second
of miraculous hope that he had in fact left an unshakeable visage in
her mind of a intelligent and charming guy who was compelling in
spite of his abnormally square face.
It was actually her and
the testosterone mountain just returning to the bar but she decided
to point out her prior tool just for amusement points with the man.
“Ah here he is. A
literal fudge packer, it's his job and everything haha!”
“Hur Hurr Hurr” The
gorilla's chest heaves almost out of his tight, sweaty shirt as he grunts in
amusement.
Darren decides that
however boring he might be he is not on the level of a zoo animal
people can gawk and cackle at.
“Technically I'm a
fudge slicer, the packing happens further towards the back.”
“Yeah I bet it does
mate.” The ape proves he can indeed form sentences while the woman
explodes into laughter and wraps her arms around one of his. Darren
decides to keep his mouth shut and the couple eventually bounce away
giggling and grunting.
Immediately, without a word, another
fit, young guy quickly steals the empty seat left behind and drags it
to his own table where he and his good-looking friends entertain a
group of good-looking women. Darren sighs and leaves the throbbing
glare of the nightclub. He thinks to himself on the long walk back
home in the cold black air, how primitive people still are. Just a
bunch of animals all competing to try and shove things into their
mouth or groin. Maybe everyone else is boring.
This idea quickly
dissipates the next morning with the soggy thud of the factory
cleaver onto a wobbly brown log. The conveyor belt pauses just long
enough to pry apart the sections of sticky fudge with a spatula
before juddering along to serve up another loaf. Darren reflects
further on questions far too grandiose and philosophical for the
backdrop of Droylsden chocolate factory.
Food and sex, that's
all anyone is really bothered with and Darren finds himself
patronisingly divorced from both. All the great advances of humanity
throughout history and we still chase the basest instincts. He thinks
back to news reports about the Mars Rover machine currently exploring
the red planet. “Discovering alien life would really kick
everyone's arse into gear.” he murmurs to himself.
“Simmons! Cleaning!”
Darren turns to the table of brown stained rags to his side and
miserably wipes the cleaver across them in the short pause between
fudge loafs arriving.
“I'm doing it!” He
yells back at a grizzly looking manager on the rusty metal catwalks
above him. Martin Hackett was an intimidating figure even with his
fluttering hair net. He was not adverse to clobbering employees over
the head with utensils and seemed to derive such carnal pleasure from
bellowing at his workforce that he retained the same ear-splitting
volume whether he was across the room or inches from your face.
It was only the five
gruelling years of employment here since the age of twenty that gave Darren the nerve to yell
back at him. There is no right response to fist-pumping sadists like
him but attempting to match his Alpha male hollering would more often
appease or at least amuse him.
“No dickhead! Up
here!” Darren looks back up at him as he glares authority down like a floodlight before strolling off like a military general with hands held
behind his back.
Darren sighs with an
audible growl and smacks a large button on the side of the machine.
The conveyor keeps moving but his colleagues down the line will have
to pick up the slack. God forbid they halt production for a second
while he fishes an insect out of the mixture vats. Darren slogs his
way up the stairs to the catwalks thinking that if we ever do
discover an alien species, our collective human stupidity and narrow
mindedness combined won't be enough brainpower to explain our moronic
practices of one-upmanship, ego masturbation and the need to exert
control over other people.
Darren snatches a net
from a hook on the wall lifting the pole above his head as the net
and his apron flap around in the closer proximity to the air
conditioning. He approaches the vat in question and gazes at the
ambiguous black shape bobbing in the dark brown mixture. If someone's
thrown their hat in again for a joke, Martin will pour the punishment
out over everyone for months to come.
Darren leans across and
sticks the pole out over the gallons of gloop in the tank. He scoops
at the black misshapen object only for it to somehow fall out of the
net's basket. He swipes at it again but no matter how rigidly he
holds the net upright, the shape hops out of the basket and back into
the fudge before Darren's tired eyes can even focus on what on Earth
it was. The object has now landed further away across the mixture
towards the far end of the vat.
Increasingly frustrated
and baffled Darren stretches over the catwalk railings and extends
the net pole as far as he can. Lying almost horizontal across the
railings he hooks his foot over the bar on the opposite side. The
bizarre and unwieldy pose is in fact Martin's own interpretation on
the health and safety regulations and Darren would face worse
castigation for refusing to put his life in danger.
Despite this, after
five years Darren was quite adept at the monotonous tasks of the
factory. With all higher brain functions on standby, his muscle
memory and subconscious patterns were firmly ingrained and naturally
executed although he would never receive any form of recognition to know
this.
A hair's breadth from
the extent of his outstretched net, Darren nudges the object against
the wall at the far end of the vat, biting his lip and straining to
splash the contaminant back towards him. Unfortunately it's nigh on
impossible to create waves in an ocean of fudge.
“For fuck's sake, I
don't even get paid for this extra toilet cleaning bollocks.”
Suddenly the large
metal fan blades used to stir the mixture begin to move, despite such
strict regulations that even Martin would demand they remain off when
someone is “performing maintenance”. The blades continue to spin
regardless and as they speed up Darren realises that somehow
regulations have been thrown to the wind and the shit (or fudge) was
about to hit the fan(s).
Before he can pull back
the net out from the sticky chocolate swamp, the spinning fan blades
have made a rotation and caught the pole against it. Darren lets go
of the pole but a moment too late having already been dragged the few
dangerous inches out of balance. Gravity executes the rest as Darren
falls head first over the railings, cracking his skull on the side of
the metal vat before sliding into the mixture followed by his torso
and legs smacking against the surface. Horrifyingly quickly his body
begins to sink into the unknowable brown ooze, swallowed up like a
helpless raisin into a monstrous Cadbury Sarlacc...
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