BooksBarbecue
Back At Dawn
Chapters (39)
  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Dedication
  4. 1
  5. 1
  6. 1
  7. 1
  8. 1
  9. 1
  10. 1
  11. 1
  12. 1
  13. 1
  14. 1
  15. 1
  16. 1
  17. 1
  18. 1
  19. 1
  20. 1
  21. 1
  22. 1
  23. 1
  24. 1
  25. 1
  26. 1
  27. 1
  28. 1
  29. 1
  30. 1
  31. 1
  32. 1
  33. 1
  34. 1
  35. 1
  36. 1
  37. 1
  38. 1
  39. Copyright

I spent the first hour searching craigslist for any short-notice work—helping somebody move, passing out fliers, painting the walls of an apartment, anything, really—but the few inquiries I made went unanswered. I had eaten one of Jeff ’s bagels for breakfast, something I was sure he’d notice and bitch about, but I didn’t care. By ten I was already hungry. By eleven I was starving.

At eleven thirty I walked downstairs to the lunchroom. It was situated between the bathroom and the mailroom, which meant that the bathroom could only be accessed by walking through the lunchroom. I’d have to be quick. I opened the fridge. It was packed full of brown bags and microwavable lunches. I dug through the nearest bag—macaroni salad, chips, sliced carrots, pudding. I pushed it back in and went to the next. I pulled out a ham and cheese sandwich, shoved it into my pocket, rushed back upstairs.

One of the few benefits of my job was my cubicle. It was, as far as I could tell, the best in the building, my desk situated in such a way that nobody walking by could see me or my computer screen, unlike most of the other cubes, which were out in the open. I quickly got into the habit of doing a half hour of work and then surfing the Web and checking email for the next half hour to counterbalance the effort. I ate the sandwich while checking my personal email. My hunger was assuaged, if only for the moment. I went back downstairs and did the same thing an hour later, pilfering a strawberry yogurt that I ate with my fingers in the bathroom stall. When I went down again, at two o’clock, the fridge was empty. The last two hours of the workday were spent in hunger. Just before I left for the day, a company-wide email arrived warning that any employee caught with food that wasn’t theirs would be terminated immediately.

2

It took forty minutes to get to and from work. When I left at four thirty I always beat Jeff back by an hour, sometimes two or three; the new place would cut ten minutes off my commute. When I got back I went into the kitchen and took four slices of bread and placed them into two plastic sandwich bags. I buried both beneath my shirts in the top dresser drawer. Tuesday’s lunch. I was so hungry that the simple thought of food caused me to salivate. I knew I wouldn’t last the week by only stealing a bite here and there.