THE STORY OF TOAST

Store room level D and the pharmacy guy is in my way.  Unsqueezed spot bulging on the corner of his thin mean lips.  Thin and mean like his tie.

No one knows why he dresses so formally.  Idiot.

Its early and breakfast is rolling out to the patients that can eat it.  The ward is full of the smell of burnt toast.
I'm leaning on the wall waiting by the small kitchen stuffed with domestic staff in teal tops.  I look in.

THAT TOAST SMELLS AWESOME i'm saying REALLY AWESOME, REALLY REALLY AWESOME.

A teenage domestic with bright foal eyes and the haircut of an older woman.  An older woman in 1960, all big with a huge sweeping fringe like a giant yellow wave.
No blue hairnet for her.

YOU WANT SOME? she's saying in a voice bright and bursting with eagerness.  Keen to please.

YES PLEASE.

The pharmacy guy is off.  Mouth tight.  People shake their heads mumbling that he never talks to anyone, chip on his shoulder, who's he think he is?

I nod.  IDIOT!  I say.
I go in the store and sit on the kick stool and thumb at my phone.  Actually get bars up here on D.

Toast.  

Every morning the place is full of the burnt funk filling my head with images of melting butter like wet buttercups and sharp crunchy black corners.

Every morning.  But to actually get some.  Well!

In it comes wrapped in napkins.  

ROS IS COMING.  DONT LET ROS KNOW.  KEEP I HIDDEN FROM ROS. SHE'S A WELL, SHE'S A . . . BITCH and the word doesn't sit right on her young tongue.

Ros is a white haired sister.  All business and intolerance but always with a smile for me because i always say yes.

She's asking about fluid tubing and if i can get Y connectors independent of the sets and i dont say yes because i know i can't.  I say i'll look into it.  Then she's on about the other Trusts shes working in and how stuff runs better there.

My toast is in napkins behind a box of sterile water on a shelf.

And when she is gone i eat it but its only yellow and not brown or black and all the butter has melted in leaving it limp and its cold.
Plus it unforgivably not cut into triangles!  Just two soft yellow oblongs.

I thought everyone knew triangles taste better.