The Robot

The skeletons in my closet are just old versions of me. The ones I starved so I could survive, locked behind the door with them in darkness. Fear led me to believe that staying confined was noble if it kept you from drifting away from the people you love, but there is one past version of me that just won’t die.

The child. The dreamer. The one who refuses to be smothered, like a trick candle that won’t be snuffed out so easily.

“What are we doing today?” I can hear her hopeful smile peeking through the gloom.

“Working,” I whisper.

“Oh boy! Will we change the world? I hope we get to do something new and exciting. I hope it involves music and laughter and sunshine and—”

“Not today.” I cut her off as I flip on the lights to the dead-end job I’ve been working for seven years. “Today,” I sigh, “we make bacon. Again.”

The gas lines click as I fire up the grill. She is quiet as I head to the walk-in fridge to pull out an industrial-sized case of heart disease and throw a hundred slices on the grill at once. The bacon sizzles and pops as fat meets steel, the smoky steam blooming into my face, permeating my clothes—my pores. This place really is a part of me now. Molecularly.

“Can I ask you a question?” the small voice whispers.

“Yeah?”

“Why are we still here?”

I sigh. “Because adults need money, and adults don’t whine or complain when they don’t get their dream job. They stay. When they can’t find anything better, they just… keep going.”

“But what if they’re going in the wrong direction?”

The question lingers. I ignore it, flipping the bacon as I tick down my mental checklist for the morning. Lights. Bacon. Bread.

The sound is like nails on a chalkboard as I slide the giant sheet pans into the bread proofer and bend down to pick up the tray of water that leaks out of the bottom of the unit—always leaking, always an overwhelming mess to clean if you let it drip too long and forget its drowning. It brings to mind the robot that was cursed to clean up its own endless leak of hydraulic fluid—its life force—until the leak became too great and it just... stopped working, its joints growing stiffer and stiffer until it was stuck, hunched over and hollowed out by a lifetime of trying too hard to succeed at something it was programmed to fail.

“We used to be so creative… What happened?”

The question makes me stumble, sloshing water over the sides of the pan. I sigh, dumping the remaining water down the sink drain. I replace the tray beneath the endless leak and reach for the mop.

“That door closed a long time ago. This is our life now.”

“But I thought we would do so many incredible things. What happened to writing? What happened to music?”

I don’t have the heart to tell her that we stopped believing in ourselves a long time ago, so instead I say, “Maybe it will come back one day. But for now, we keep going.”

She is quiet for the rest of the morning while we set up shop.

My manager shows up to work, fussing that I’m taking too long to open the store. I can feel the child listening, indignant tears rising to her eyes. I blow out her candle so she doesn’t have to listen, leaving her in the dark with the skeletons while I apologize for existing.

“Sorry. I’ll do better tomorrow.”

It takes a long time for the flame to spark again, and I can’t help but wonder if I was truly the robot all along—not because I have to clean up an endless leak, but because each spark I snuff brings me closer to becoming a skeleton before I can see what lies on the other side of the door.