Jeremy, the school’s assistant cook, was still five days to receiving his pink slip. He donned the hair net as he had grown accustomed to and entered into the large room of steel instruments and white tile. Signs created in oversized letters, bolded and underlined, instructed him to wash his hands at least three different times. He did so obediently, remembering from his pandemic years precisely how to accrue the soap’s foam in between his fingers. Now dried, he completed all the steps needed a day’s work — even taking it upon himself to wake at 5:30AM and so arrive before his supervisor. Yet, still, he could not shake something was strange.
Today was the school’s famed home-made Alfredo day, a reduction of milk, flour, butter, Parmesan, salt, fresh-ground pepper, and a five-cheese blend he was not permitted to know. The roux came together well — a bubbly, aromatic mixture of butter and flour, a small miracle he had grown perhaps too used to. The curse, though, lay in the milk. As soon as he poured it in — gradually, mixing carefully to not separate the ingredients — a curiosity took hold. It would not reduce. Steam bubbled up, but the line of the pot would stay still. Medium-high heat turned to high would not make it budge. A boil, roiling, with the butter-milk mixture beginning to burn at the bottom, too would not make it decrease. If anything… no, it could not be… the mixture was climbing towards the surface.
“Morning, Jer,” Alicia casually said, strolling in. His manager of three years — what would she think?