Exercise 4 (Anna)

Maybe when they bake the donuts one of them says to the other one, Hey, Mike, Time to make the donuts! Or maybe one of them is a Pakistani or some other kind of Arab and he keeps to himself, keeps his head down, keeps some kind of Sikh turban on his head the whole time. Then he says, is it the hour to make the donuts? And he doesn’t get the lingo right and the other guy can tell (even without the turban) that he’s a foreigner. The other guy might ask him (if he’s a racist) why he doesn’t work at a Seven Eleven like all the other Arabs. And then the guy might get offended and he wouldn’t turn the deep fryer thing on the right temperature. Maybe they have a dial and everything is pre-set so you can’t screw it up—there’s a little sticker by the dial that says “turn to position 3, wait 30 seconds.” Maybe the guy would turn it up really high and not say anything. He would smile this polite stoic face smile because he is actually an out of work university professor, and he would turn up the heat on the fryer, and then he would go get the sticky mop that the teenage kid on the late night shift didn’t rinse out from the sugary coffee spill he mopped up at the end of the night and he would soak the mop in a high concentration of soap and mop the area around the fryer. And then the racist guy would maybe slip, not a lot, because he walks the same five steps every single morning from the big refrigerator with its wax covered trays of pre-rolled donuts to the deep fryer, but he might slip just enough for the donuts to slide in faster than usual and the oil might splatter on the counter. And even if it didn’t splatter on him, possibly maybe it might cause him to reach over to wipe it up and that’s when the other guy can mop into his legs and interfere with his balance.

Then they would have to call in the teenage kid to fill in and he would be wasted. They make the donuts at five am and they only pay $4.75 an hour. It would probably make a former university professor extremely depressed to work in those conditions. While the teenage kid was out front making the coffee (everything is labeled out there too, the coffee already pre-measured and wrapped up with a filter in an individually wrapped foil bag—nothing to think about—the kid can keep his Ween on high and his sweaty eyes on the floor away from reflective surfaces) he could lean against the back counter where they unload the packets of pre-assembled ham-and-cheese croissants and the crème filler machine and while he was squirting synthetic vanilla bean flavored custard into one of the greasy thin-skinned donut pouches he could let himself depress the lever for a little bit too long. Not so much too long that the donut would explode but just enough that some of the crème would come out of the hole. And then maybe he would let the crème slide onto his index finger that he was using to depress the lever. And when he put the donut down on the wax-paper-covered tray he would use just a little too much force, whacking it down, so that some more cream would squirt out. And then he would hold it in and do all the other ones perfect, lining them up in rows with the intervals offset so they don’t touch. And then when it was time to blade on the waxy chocolate frosting he would slap some of them harder than others, and feel them deflate just a little bit under his blade.

And then when all of them were done he would turn the blade over and with the handle he would punch a hole in the center of each one. A sticky, plastic-handle waxy-chocolate vanilla-custard hole. He’s a former university professor, but he’s not a refugee. He doesn’t even speak Arabic. He’s from Tallahassee.