This 4600 word short story, written in 2018, imagines a future that feels closer every day. I dragged it out of my folder of old projects because certain current events have made the themes topical.

Your phone is a never-ending cacophony of alerts, but you leave it on full volume anyway. The beeps and dings at least fill the silence in between orders. The drive-thru and vendors are fully automated, so most days you can count the number of actual people you have to help on one hand. You don’t even have any coworkers to talk to. Unless you count typing orders to the food processors. Sometimes they feel just as intelligent as the supposed humans—not bots, if you can trust yourself to tell the difference—whose status updates and tweets scroll by on your feed.

So you ignore the dings. You sanitize the drum for the smoothie machine, manually confirm the deep fryer’s temperature, and tape an out-of-order sign on one of the three vendors. That’s maybe twenty minutes of work stretched over an hour. You pause to fuss with your hair, and handle everything real slow, so you don’t chip a nail. You gotta be careful. If you blast through your duties too fast you’ll be left with nothing but social media to tide you over till shift end.

The drive-thru’s terminal is kinda dingy and oily no matter how you scrub it. You’ve tried bleach and vinegar cleaners, and you think both might actually melt the plastic a little. Right now the pitted screen says it served 73 cars breakfast and 234 cars lunch. You don’t even see them; that whole side of the building is just whirring machines behind stainless steel panels. You have a lot of respect for the drive-thru. The whole time you’ve worked here it’s only needed you to crawl in and fix something, like, twice. You feed the hoppers more sliced potatoes and coffee beans, check the condiment levels, and give the assembly an affectionate pat.

Your limbo’s interrupted by the autoprogramming on the TV getting told by some algorithm to switch to crisis coverage. Since this happens about eight thousand times a week, you just note the billowing smoke and reach for your phone. California’s probably on fire again.  You ignore your notifications and go straight to your feed. Looks like the same old news: football scores, celebrity marriages, new superfoods. Hurricanes, wildfires, evacuations. Half of the articles are stealth ads, and damned if you know which half. Some prime minister from a country you’ve barely heard of was caught in a corruption scandal. You tap that one, and it redirects to a flashing logo and commercial spiel for the 0.3 seconds it takes you to close the tab.

You finally see the headline in your notifications right when the TV unmutes itself, so you read as well as hear: “Anacostia Freeway bridge collapses, stranding thousands of motorists”. You don’t even know where that is. You click on the article, get told to turn off your ad blocker, and sit through a fifteen second commercial for your own damn fast food franchise. The blurb right under the headline reads “Damage partial, 11^th Street bridges still intact”. You’re about to close out the page before it can spring another ad on you when the TV says “I-295”.

Oh, you know where that is. You were almost cured of curiosity, but that’s the way into the capital. You pull up Google Maps. The highways just south and east of you are a snarl of solid red. And, right smack in the middle, is the little GPS tracking icon with your mother’s face.

Shit! She has dialysis today! You go to her profile page. She hasn’t checked in at the clinic. There’s nothing new on her wall, not for the past two hours. But you’ve got notifications from half your friends about the gridlock. You pull one group conversation up and see clip after clip of smoke rising, ambulances trying to weave between cars.

You are so not here for this. You can’t close the store, but you give the drive-thru a cursory check and lock the register. You dump your apron on the floor, then reconsider and shove it under the counter with the hairnet you never use. Any luddites who want to get their burger from a real human being are just gonna have to cope.

The talking heads on the news say the vital question is: “Whose fault is this?” They say it about ten times while you’re setting up camp in a booth and plugging your phone in. You get up to mute that noise by forcing a factory reset on the TV, which is probably against like fifteen franchise guidelines but like hell do you care.

Medicaid keeps your momma on a strict schedule for her dialysis and sends her to a clinic way downtown. She wasn’t able to explain why her appointments couldn’t be moved. But you called the number on the back of her insurance card and reached an automated attendant who convinced you, if only through sheer intractability. Seven menu options and not one of them could get you past the canned explanation for why Momma’s dialysis has gotta be at that time and place.

Your franchise’s app was equally useless when you tried to rearrange your work schedule. You get thirty-four hours a week, tops, and they still manage to conflict with everything important in life. You know yelling at the phone for an operator got you a black mark in some employee database, but you hate that your momma has to drive herself.

You click your nails on the table. The chipped polish catches your eye because it’s another thing out of place, something else falling apart that you can’t fix. The best you can do is hide ragged edges under coats of shiny-bright paint. The best you could do for you momma was put gas in her car. One-quarter tank. It was supposed to be enough.

Would it kill the news sites to just, like, present some facts? Apparently, because every site’s a circus of autoplaying videos prefaced with ads. Has anyone in the history of ever cared about some talking head’s opinion that Representative Joe Shmoe is responsible for the loss of life, for reason of tweeting about excessive spending yesterday? They’re reaching so hard for that conclusion that they’ve barely got it by the fingertips. But here it is, being presented like the gospel when all you want to know is who’s dead.

The door swings open and your whole body tenses. It is your job to be on that register, but damn. No, you’re gonna say no. Even though the guy who walks in is hot. Late twenties, clean-cut, real nice suit. Looks tailored. He’s probably only doing fast food instead of gastropub because he wanted to wait out the gridlock. He must not be local, if he’s picked here to hang out.

He shuffles around the order counter for a second, doing a confused head-bob. You know your hair and makeup are flawless, so when he stares at you for five whole seconds you don’t even flinch. “Uh,” he says, intelligently. “Do you work here?”

You try to sound confident. “I clocked out,” hah, that’s a lie, “because of the bridge collapse.” Is he gonna get mad? “My elderly, disabled mother is stuck in it.”

“Oh yeah, it’s bad out there,” he says. He’s all smiles and sympathy for you now. He and his shiny leather Oxfords trot right over. “Mind if I sit here?”

You shrug, and he plants his butt on the bench across from you. He then sets up a laptop, a tablet, and a smartphone. He’s got one of those multi-headed plug things that turns one outlet into three for all his device chargers. Youth plus travel plus tech means he’s probably out of Silicon Valley, or somewhere else money flows.

He keeps peeking at you over his screens, even though you’re still just scrolling on your phone. Yeah, you know you’re pretty. Some days that feels like the only thing you have going for you.

You dial your momma and pray that she doesn’t crash her car trying to answer. All you hear is a series of monotonous beeps. Busy signal? Or has her cell tower overloaded? You put the phone down.

Tech Bro perks up like a puppy. “I was supposed to have a meeting with my boss downtown,” he says. He makes it sound like a guilty confession. Like you’re gonna resent him for being important enough that his corporate overlords want to see his face. You’ve never met your boss, but who cares. “It looks like they’re postponing it. Traffic’s impossible. I’ll probably have to stay an extra night or two in town.”

You’re out of sites to check, so you might as well chat until your mom calls back. “I hope you get paid for that. Why aren’t they on Zoom like the rest of the world?”

He laughs. “We try to do an annual meeting close to the lobbying office. Get everyone from both coasts together, go over core values and strategy. I’m jetlagged, so I’m kinda glad it got postponed.” You raise an eyebrow, and he goes from preening to backpedaling in a flash. “Of course, the bridge collapse is tragic! What’s the news been saying?”

“Whole lot of nothing,” you say disgustedly. “I can’t even find a death count.”

“You gotta check international news,” he says. “DW or Reuters will have it. Do you use entanGold? Their feed has a great headline collator.”

“Haven’t heard of that app,” you say. You smile sweetly and lean forward. You will hang on every word out of this guy’s mouth if it gets him and his fancy data package to do your research for you. Your data plan only does top-tier websites. Last time you checked a nonpremium site the loading screen timed out.

“Oh, I guess they’re relatively new. They might be invite-only still? It’s a great social media app. Their content tagging is amazing,” he prattles. You nod and smile through his spiel and wait for him to say something relevant. Your phone notifies you that another Wi-Fi network just popped up. He must’ve set up a mobile hot spot, because he finally starts typing on his tablet.

“This is from just now,” he says, after about five seconds. “Twenty-three confirmed dead, more than one hundred injured.” He keeps scrolling with a frown. “Looks like pretty much every first responder in the city is on this. But like, there are thousands more stuck in traffic than in the accident. I really lucked out.”

You show him your momma’s GPS location so he can check it against his map. Her little bubble is still hovering in the same spot, right at the south end of the collapsed bridge. But that could mean nothing. She could be a good mile in either direction. You pray.

The TV finishes reinstalling all its updates and blares back to life. The talking heads have moved on from discussing whose fault the collapse is to whose fault the inadequate response is. It takes you thirty seconds to realize that they’re on about a different collapsed bridge, way down in Texas. They make emphatic noises about crumbling infrastructure and conspicuously stop slinging blame. You wonder who pays them.

Your new friend’s attention span winds down and he runs off to the vendors. You dial your momma again, and again. Beep, beep, beep. Facebook is pushing ads for some new movie today. They need to be paused one by one as you scroll, and every time they load your wall jitters up and down and you miss the pause button. You accidentally open three tabs before you make it to your local friends’ live updates.

It doesn’t look good. You see a grainy video of helicopters circling, taken from someone’s car window. The first picture you see makes the bridge look fine. Then you notice the rubble sitting on the water just beneath it. The southbound side must still be up. Your momma was headed north. Zoomed-in pictures show a ribbon of concrete stretched like taffy in the water, snapped steel girders on either end.  Paramedics in bright orange vests wade alongside the bridge. There are cars perched on the concrete, cars belly-up in the water.

Your stomach clenches. Why are you even looking at all this? What do you think you’ll see, the wreckage of your momma’s car?

“Hey, mind if I mess with this?” Tech Bro says. He’s chewing on chicken strips from a vendor and has flipped up the sign on the broken one to poke at the touchscreen. You give him a thumbs-up and listen to the beeps. You dial again. This time it goes straight to voicemail, so you tell her to call you ASAP. You check your momma’s profile. You dial again.

She picks up. “Hello?” she says. Her voice is tinny and faint, almost overwhelmed by static. It’s the best noise you’ve ever heard.

“Momma!” you say. “You okay? Where are you?” Tech Bro’s head snaps up.

“Oh, I don’t… I don’t know,” she says. She’s got that lilting tone in her voice, the one that makes her sound eighty instead of sixty. “Is that you, love?”

“Yes Momma, it’s me. Where are you? Are you on I-295?”

She’s quiet for a beat. Then she says, “Oh sweetie, I think I’ve missed my appointment. Am I in trouble?”

“No Momma, no!” you say. They’ll have some form or another to get you an exemption from the skipped appointment fee by reason of disaster. If you’re lucky they’ll even reschedule her. “I’ll take care of all that, I promise. Just tell me what you see.”

“Oh, there are an awful lot of police cars. Traffic’s not moving at all! But the radio hasn’t mentioned anything,” she says.

You know your momma. Her radio’s sitting on the same Christian Contemporary station she’s had it on your whole life. Their programming is all syndicated; they never do news. “Momma, have you tried changing the station?”

She’s quiet. Quiet for too long. “Momma, you there?”

Her breath rattles, in-out-in-out, before she replies, “Oh yes, sweetie, I’m here. Traffic’s not moving at all!”

She’s repeating herself. Your blood runs cold. “Momma, are you feeling okay?”

“Oh, now that you mention it, not really!” she lilts, giggling.

You check the clock. It’s been three hours since lunch, and one hour since she should’ve been at the clinic. “Momma, how’s your blood glucose? Do you have snacks?”

“Yes sweetie, I have the pretzel packs for my appointment. They’re in the back seat.”

You breathe a sigh of relief. “Okay, Momma? I need you to eat one right away.”

She doesn’t reply for ages, and you’re just about crazy with worry over whether she’s that out of it or the cell signal is just that bad. “They’re in the back seat,” she repeats, finally. “I can’t reach them.”

“You’re in gridlock, get out of the car and go get them!” you shout.

You listen to what might be her breathing, might be static. Then chimes sound, clear as a bell, and your phone gets forcibly reconnected by your franchise’s app. You’re just surprised it didn’t happen sooner.

“Associate Williams,” some HR bunny says in a chipper voice, “this is only your first warning! I’m sorry, but you cannot make personal calls on-shift.”

“So clock me out!” you demand, fighting to keep your voice even.

You hear typing. “There is no replacement associate available in your area. I cannot terminate your scheduled hours.”

“Were you not listening to my call?” you grit out. “I’m having a family emergency!”

“I’m sorry to hear that, Ms. Williams. But I need to ask you to return to work, as per your employment agreement. Our monitors show that you’ve been away from your duty station for fifty-eight minutes. You have exceeded your allowed break and will not be paid for this time.”

Oh no, you’re being docked the cost of a large fries. “Lady. I don’t care. I need to make sure my mom is okay.”

She tells you you’re dinged for a second infraction and practically starts to read the corporate handbook. It isn’t until you’ve tried to interrupt her three times that you realize she’s not even in the conversation anymore—she’s switched in her own pre-recorded voice.

You try to check Facebook, but the franchise app has locked your phone. There’s a button for emergency services and that’s it. You slam your phone face down on the table to muffle the robot’s spiel.

Tech Bro is still fighting the vendor. He made it spit out a smoothie, but of course it locked up again afterwards. You never know why these things break. By now you can override them in a fraction of the time it’s taken him.  All you have to do is go through like five nested submenus to unearth the option for manually approving the order. Unfortunately, there’s no way for you to reset the vendor so people off the street can get their food. A technician from the manufacturer will need to stop by with a remote device dealie that can input the proprietary key code. And by ‘a technician’ you mean Liam, since he’s the literal only guy for the south side. You’ll add your location to his work queue today and be lucky to see him inside of three weeks.

You realize you’ve been glaring in Tech Bro’s general direction when he meets your eyes and heads over. He looks sheepish. “I didn’t make it worse, did I?” he asks, holding the smoothie out like an offering. You accept it and suck hard on the straw. The sludgy sugar cheers you up a little. You give him a shrug and lift your phone off the table with the tip of one nail. The robotic droning is instantly audible.

“That’s some bullshit,” Tech Bro says, gesturing at your phone. “Wanna use mine?”

You consider it for half a second, and then make grabby hands until he slides his phone over. If this emergency is important enough to get you in trouble at work, then it’s important enough to log in from some stranger’s phone. There are worse things in life than letting a cute guy from out of town have your contact info. He won’t be creepy with it. Hopefully.

The screen says Tech Bro’s name is Jackson. You log in and tell his phone to not auto-download your apps. This means you can’t check most of your momma’s social media, but you still get into your address book and group hangouts.

You dial your momma. You dial again. You remember to mouth “thank you” at Jackson over the beeps. You listen to him tapping on his tablet and feel like the world’s contracting at the edges. Your vision fuzzes black in the periphery and you force yourself to take a deep breath.

The robo lady on your phone is still going. So’s the TV, which has switched to ground-level interviews with victims of the disaster, conducted between columns of stalled cars. You snort.

“I know, right?” Jackson says, following your gaze. “Paramedics can’t get through, but here we are with cable news.” He has a nice laugh. All his teeth are white and even, and his cheeks dimple adorably. Maybe you wouldn’t mind if he pulls your info off his phone to contact you again.

“I’m not even sure whether we’re watching local or the bridge collapse in Texas anymore,” you say.

“I know what you mean,” Jackson says. He leans in close, puts his elbows on the table. “It’s like… It all blurs together, after a while. You know? Disaster fatigue. There’ll always be some crisis happening somewhere. But you gotta be able to tune it out and live your life, right?”

That’s not the right term. It’s compassion fatigue. You nod along, but there’s a pit of tension in your stomach. If Jackson gets to “live his life” despite everything that’s been crumbling to pieces since before either of you were born, he’s stupidly privileged.

You force yourself to give him a smile. Then you hear your name.

“Ms. Williams? Are you there?” your phone says. You snatch it up and affirm. “It has now been seventy-five minutes since you left your duty station.”

“She’s with a customer!” shouts Jackson, trying to be helpful. You cover a grin. The lady on the other end pauses, and you know she can see by the cameras that he’s not lying. She still repeats the same line about duty stations. This might be a new lady; you think her voice sounds subtly different.

“Look,” you interrupt. “The drive-thru is still running fine. I’m sitting here with the one dining area customer we’ve had in three hours. I already got told I’m the only associate available. My momma’s involved in a major accident; I just wanna be able to monitor her situation. Please unlock my phone.”

There’s another pause. For a moment you think the lady might show an ounce of compassion, but then she sticks to her script. It’s doubtful she’s allowed to be compassionate on the clock. “We are aware of the disaster in your area and have set up a form you can use to reduce your hours for this and the following week. You can navigate to this form through our app right now. I would like to express my condolences. But I need you to return to the register.”

You’re way past done listening to her, but she keeps going. “By the terms of your employment, you must execute your duties as described in your initial contract. This is your third infraction, so I’m obligated to schedule compliance retraining for you. These sessions are mandatory and will not be paid.”

“Good luck with that, lady,” you say, scrolling through all the self-service forms in the app’s menu. You’ve almost made up your mind. This job rules the most important hours of your week for a measly $15 per hour, pre-tax. That would’ve been a livable amount oh, fifty years ago. You and your momma each get about that much for breathing: you from universal basic income, her from supplemental security income.

Anyone would say that you’re lucky to have a job. Fast food kitchens like this used to have a few dozen staff to keep them running 24/7, until a cost-benefit analysis somewhere said automation was the way to go. You don’t know if that’s true—it’s hard to believe, with how expensive all these machines are, and how often they break—but it doesn’t matter what you think. It also doesn’t matter what you know, what you can do, or what you could learn. After the big thinkers and corporate execs decided labor didn’t have value, that was it for the economy. If you don’t make or own the machines that replaced people, you’re nothing. And just a few guys can make a lot of machines.

At least you didn’t try to go to college like some people. You couldn’t have afforded the schools that connect you to the upper crust, those elite few who still have money to circulate. All a degree would’ve gotten you is student debt to go with the apron and hairnet.

This one job you managed to find doesn’t come with benefits, not even unpaid time off. You can’t set your schedule, you’ll never be promoted. They won’t raise you above minimum wage. If there even is a “they”. When you interact with corporate, it’s machines, apps, scripts, and policy all the way down. You can’t name a single human in the hierarchy who makes decisions. There definitely are stuffed suits sitting on top, raking in billions, but they like their privacy.

It’s the same all over. No wage job was ever gonna pay enough to get you off welfare. How much do you really care about having a little extra spending money? Hell, if you’re not working here then Momma won’t need to drive herself, and you won’t need to go anywhere without the car. You can stop paying your bus card! You can call your aunt and tell her you’ll nanny for your little cousins like she asked! If she pays you half what you were making here she’ll still be saving on childcare.

But you wouldn’t have spent the last year of your life babysitting robotic burger flippers if you didn’t want to work a real job. You stick a nail in your mouth and then yank it out before you accidentally bite down. Ms. Williams, Restaurant Associate. Williams, unemployed welfare recipient.

You turn away, stare at the far wall. Each of those unreliable vendors probably costs the company five times your annual income in licensing. You are so over this. “Okay, so, just to clarify; I’m one of the only people you guys can get to run this store. I know how to fix the drive-thru. I’m trained in literally everything this restaurant does. So, since you guys need me, can I stand at the register and use my phone?”

“Ms. Williams, that is in contravention of company policy. Your phone will remain locked for the duration of your shift,” she says.  You put her on speaker so she can finish her script while you read. Jackson’s lips purse above his coffee and he gives your phone an incredulous look. If he’s a tech bro, it’s plausible that this really is the first time he’s seen the corporate grindstone in action. You tap through the franchise app, trying to finish what you’re doing before the HR lady runs out of steam.

She reminds you about your non-compete clause and winds down. Incredibly, you find yourself smiling. You submit the form you were working on. It only took about thirty seconds from the fields auto-populating to e-signing and submitting. Why didn’t you do this sooner? Maybe it’ll come back to bite you in the ass, but you’re not giving them two weeks’ notice.

“Kayyyy, I understand. Thanks for your time,” you say. You wait a beat, hoping she’ll ask if you’re going back to the register so you can shoot her down. “Anyway, I submitted my like, termination form? Basically—I quit.”

It’s crazy how little power she has over you now. She can’t even make you close the store. You get your phone unlocked, hang up, and uninstall the franchise’s app. Then you’re sitting across from a cute guy with a smoothie at your elbow and empty days stretching ahead.

“Why’d you quit?” he asks. “Don’t you need the money?”

You shrug. He looks uncomfortable. Disapproving. Too bad, you almost liked him. But you don’t need to see your own doubts written across his face. While you still have his phone, you hurry and give your friends a heads-up. Then you log out, hand his phone back with your name hovering above the switch user icon. On your phone, the map shows the red traffic snarls contracting. Your momma’s dot hasn’t moved.

It’s funny that your hands are shaking. Your brain’s doing everything it can to tell your body that this is objectively a good decision, but you kind of feel like crying? You want your momma. Jackson’s staring at you all pensive. You don’t care. You don’t.

“I think I gotta head out,” you say. All you need is your purse. You’ll figure out how to get help to your momma on your way home. Maybe someone will know someone stuck on that road with her. You’ll walk the whole crumbling bridge yourself if that’s what it takes.

You stuff your name tag in the smoothie cup, throw both in the garbage on your way out. You don’t look back.

#

I put together a few notes about “Lacquer” here. I added about 400 words in revisions before sharing this story and I’m still not sure the narrative works. But writing it taught me a lot. I welcome comments, if anyone has thoughts.