Zombie Cake
The Daily Frustrations of a Baker
1.0
Disasters and Dreams
When you finally get out of that godsforsaken place everyone calls high school (it's really just a pointless drawn out drama show), diploma in hand, you're just happy to be out. Happy to be out in the world and ready to face it, except for that one question. The big question. That one question everyone has to ask when you get that diploma in your hand. What are you going to do now?
What's your story?
What's my story? I went to high school. In it, I was the classic smart kid. I got good grades, did everything I was supposed to, applied to colleges, got accepted and graduated with honors. Run of the mill, right? It seemed like I was headed down a long and slippery slope to the bottom of the corporate ladder after I started university. I applied for art school and got in as a painting major, but changed my mind after the first year for something more "practical", as my father put it. I changed my major and left the art school for the school of business.
Business. How bland, am I right? I can at least say I didn't go for a business management degree. I really don't know what in the world that is for. Instead, I enrolled at my university as an accounting major with a minor in finance, and from there, I continued to do well in my studies and made the dean's list every semester.
I was breaking the mold!
I graduated, of course with honors again, got my degree in accounting and a few job offers in the hub of Castle Town where I went to university. A job in the big city and a nice cubicle awaited me; my father couldn't have been prouder.
So at twenty-two I sat in my cubicle, crunching numbers and making the heads of the Dragmire Corporation rich. Oh, that project you invested in five years ago? It's finally made you big shots money. Like a couple hundred thousand rupees. You know, small stuff. Oh, you want to pay the little investors some dividends? Let's first split a good two million between the big dogs before giving the common stockholders the bone of it. Oh, you have a lawsuit on your hands? Are you going to win it? Really? Oh, so I don't have to include that in your financial statements or credit your liabilities for that measly one million on the line.
After eleven months on the job, I came to a realization. I was selling my soul to Ganondorf Dragmire. The paychecks were nice, and I may have just been the wee underling, a henchman in the scheme of it all, but I was still contributing to Dragmire's company. I couldn't stand it. I hated my very grey desk. I hated my black, black chair. I hated my uncooperative computer, and even the more so uncooperative copier. I hated my cubicle and its very bland and very grey walls. I hated the stupid little plant I put on the corner of my desk in attempt to make it a little more "homey". Even the plant seemed to hate it, because after a while, it was sort of giving up on life. What I hated most of all was my boss, coffee mug in hand, "Heeey, you going to have those reports done by this afternoon?"
Fuck no, dipshit, I quit. Go shit up a rope.
And so I quit.
As soon as I quit, I went home, popped open a beer, kicked back my feet, flipped to the Food Network and thought about it. How in the hell was I going to pay for my apartment if I didn't have a job? Know something? Didn't matter, the lease was almost up, I had some savings and to be truthful, I hated living in Castle Town. It was time for something new. I needed a change. I sipped my beer thoughtfully as I watched how those really awesome tasting cupcakes with the cream filling were mass produced. I needed an adventure, I had decided, watching batches and batches of cupcakes flit before my eyes on the screen.
And then I got this idea.
So I begged my father, my grandparents, my friends, the banks, the credit unions – anybody who would give me five minutes to pitch them – for monetary loans. My father was, surprisingly, pleased that I was taking it upon myself to start my own business and was more than happy to give me a loan. My father actually has a lot of money to his name, so he offered it as a gift, but being stubborn, I only took it until he allowed me to pay him back. He was happy that I was going out in the world and taking a risk, but he disapproved of what my business actually entailed.
"Do you even know how to bake?" my father asked, scratching his head.
I groaned. "Dad, who has made you your birthday cakes for like the past ten years?"
"I thought you went out and bought those," he says thoughtfully, his eyes rolling up as he tried to think back.
"No, Dad," I said. "I made those."
He shrugged and wrote me the check, wishing me luck.
Within the next six months, I decided to pack up and move out to Kakariko Village. There, I found a little house to rent for cheap and a building big enough to hold a bakery. That's right, I left my job as an accountant for the big bad Dragmire Corporation to become a baker in a small town. I was excited. I got all the equipment together, got all my suppliers in order, got all my product together, got myself an employee hired and opened up for business.
It's been a little over a year now, and at twenty-three, I'm still paying off my debts, but so far, I don't regret it. The sky seems bluer, the grass greener, the air is even sweeter in scent. I breathe easy now. I go to bed, I go to sleep. I don't lay there and think, "Oh man, I hope I didn't fuck up those statements." I wake up and head to the bakery before the sun pokes up and get to work – usually well rested, might I add.
The bakery opens up at eight in the morning. My employee, Ingo, usually arrives somewhere around that time. He's hardly ever early, or rather even on time, but I don't really mind. I feel so less uptight about everything these days that I just don't want to ruin that, so I let it go. Not to mention, no one really seems interested as of late to work in the bakery. What really irks me about Ingo, however, is his attitude about work. He'll do it, but he's always got some comment about it. He's essentially a real whiner.
Taking a cake order doesn't have to be complicated. Ingo made one last about forty-five minutes, and jokingly, I decided to poke at him, saying, "Oh, you sure have the patience of a saint." Mistake. He spent the rest of the day going on and on about this order and how it took forty-five minutes, when all the woman really wanted was a yellow cake, white buttercream icing with yellow roses with the tips red. How hard is that? But he is just so patient to have been able handle her for an hour. You should have seen how detailed he got this down – four scraps of paper! And it only took over an hour to do.
Didn't we start at about forty-five minutes there?
"Ingo, why wasn't this done?" I'd ask.
"Oh, you know I would have had that done sooner if these labels didn't take so long to print out."
"Then why don't you multitask and do something else while they're printing out?"
Or, "Ingo, stop talking to me. I need you to slice and bag that bread."
"Oh okay, I'll get on it. It's just that martial arts taught me to look at people when I talk to them."
"You don't know any type of martial arts, Ingo."
You'd better believe I'd call his ass out every time. I'm not paying him to stand around all day, we got shit to do. I'd fire him, but then I'd be stuck running the place all by myself, and I'm already here from four in the morning to at least six in the evening. So hop to it! There are customers waiting, bread to be kneaded, proofed, baked and bagged, cakes to be made and decorated and pastries to be put out so they can sit there and look pretty. Let's get this train moving! I got people to pay back and people to disprove that I could keep a bakery going.
What is even stranger is the people in this town, and I am not just talking about the tourists. (I do have to say, though, that they are an entirely a different breed.) We get all sorts of people in here from the very boring, to the very busy, to the incredibly weird.
There's a woman who comes from the Terimanian countryside. She lived in a very, very small village - like Kakariko looks like Castle Town in comparison. There, they had one baker and whenever he fought with his wife, he wouldn't bake the next day. She tells us stories like these all the time. One time the baker's wife ran off with another man. "We didn't have bread for three weeks!" she laughed.
I wished I could refuse to work when I fought with my wife. If I had one. If that were even legal. I digress.
There's another guy that comes in and no loaf of bread is ever soft enough. He's told me so far that he's been a pilot, a businessman, a medic and blah blah blah. So long as you put on new gloves, get the bread straight from the rack and let it touch nothing but the plastic bag it's going into, he's happy. But he's a total creeper and a real weirdo for sure.
Then there's this other lady. She's a little on the slow side, I suppose. I'm not sure what exactly is wrong with her, but her grandmother's birthday was over a month ago and she's still ordering her birthday cakes. I can't keep doing this. Every time she comes in, she likes to chat and chat and chat about this guy that's her boyfriend or her fiancé or her jerk boyfriend or whatever and he was supposed to pick up the cake but that didn't happen but they might break up because of that fight they had the other night- and what am I going on about?
I love getting people that come in here, looking at all my pastries and my cakes when none of that is actually what they want. Brightly, I'll ask, "Do you need any help?"
"Yeah, can I get uh… a pound of uh…" Pound? Pound? What do I sell by the pound again? "Yeah, honey smoked turkey?"
"This is a bakery."
"Yeah."
"You need to go to the deli," I'll say, "two blocks over."
"Oh. Okay." Pause. "Thanks."
Like I said, ALL sorts of weirdos. But I like it. I love my job. Don't get me wrong. I love the smell of fresh bread in the morning and getting to make the cakes and pastries in the afternoons, and the people here definitely have their own certain flavor. Why did I ever think that accepting that job offer for Dragmire Corporation was ever a good idea? Why did I ever think that living in the big, big city – the capital of Hyrule, no less – was a fantastical idea? I like this town. It's not exactly small, but it's not that big either. And it's definitely not suburbia. At all. Shit, the lady next door to me, Anju, keeps a coop of cucco. Every now and then they get out and like to strut themselves around my yard and poop in front of my car. I still like them though. They're not so bad until they're angered.
In Kakariko, I feel like I've found some sort of content in my life that I couldn't find back in Castle Town. Maybe this was my calling all along, who knows? Just as long as I can keep paying off my debts in a timely fashion, I can be out of the red in a few years. I don't make a lot, but I make enough, and that's just fine. I have a house – well I rent a house, but I can call it home, I have a car that works, I run a business and I like it.
So today as I pull my last rack of bread out of the oven, the phone rings and rings and rings. Ugh. It just turned eight. No one's really alive in this town at eight, to be honest. Not much opens up until nine or ten. Until then, everybody is zombified. It's still so early; I don't even care if that's not a real word, despite eight am being close to my equivalent of midday. Hey, I'm kind of grouchy in the mornings, but I still get up to come here.
I close the oven, shut off the timer and throw my oven mitts on a counter. I saunter over to the phone and pick up the receiver. I knead a little sand out of my eye with my knuckle as I answer, grabbing a pen and some paper just in case it's an order.
A scruffy voice sounds from the other end. "Hello? Zelda?" Ingo. Oh dear Din, what is it today?
"Yes, it's me. What's up?" I ask him, chewing on a stray blond bang. I mean, who else would it be? Nobody else works here!
"Yeah, uh…" he hesitates, "I can't come in today."
I roll my eyes. What excuse could he possibly come up with today? "Is there a valid reason?" I ask him flatly, ready for the bullshit to fly.
"Yeah, I have a temp of a hundred and fifty degrees."
I stop, and unconsciously pull the phone away from my ear and stare at it in disbelief. I shake my head a little and put the receiver back to my ear. "What?" I say shortly.
"Yeah, I have a really high fever."
"Of a hundred and fifty degrees?" I repeat in disbelief. "Are you fucking kidding me?"
"Uh…" YEAH UHHH.
I've had enough, so I shout into the phone, "That's the biggest pile of cow manure you've tried to feed me! Who the fuck has a hundred and fifty degree fever?" I pause, thinking quickly. "And don't tell me that that's in Celsius not Fahrenheit, because that's even worse! Don't even tell me you meant to say a hundred and fifteen, because at either temperature, you're cooking, brain dead and just plain dead." The pen flies out of my hand and disappears into the depths of the bakery. "Know what?" I scream. "Just don't come in! I don't care. Not coming in today? Don't come in tomorrow. Or the next day, or the next."
Without even giving Ingo a chance to respond, I throw the phone back on the hook.
I cross my arms, fuming. The fuck was I going to do? It really sucks running the bakery all by myself all fucking day. No lunch break today. Nope! Fuck.
Shit. Fuck. Fuck. I just fired my only employee. And not in a very graceful or calm manner, but like a regular old jackass. Fuck!
I chew my lip.
It'd be a lot less stressful if there'd been people asking me for a job, but in the past months, I haven't heard one peep from somebody about getting a job here. Where in the hell am I going to find somebody?
Shit.
I sigh.
I can't do anything about it right now. It's eight o'clock, and I need to open the door. I got bread to sell. Grumbling to myself, I pull my keys out of my apron and unlock the front door and move to switch the sign from "CLOSED" to "OPEN". But I stop as soon as the sign is in my hand. I grimace and think better of it.
Smirking to myself, I throw my hands up and say, "Fuck it! I'm opening late!" My proclamation declared, I open the front door to the dawn of a new day and slam the door shut behind me. I fish for my keys again and lock the door. People want bread? Hah! They can wait today.
Oh goddess, I sound terrible. But I don't really care at the moment.
I strut myself down the street with this new sense of confidence and snobbish entitlement and make my way to the convenience store. A breeze kicks up as I walk, and the sweet scent of late summer drifts past my nose. I push open the door to the convenience store, and little bells jingle to signal my entry. I walk straight up to the counter and tell the clerk, maybe a little aggressively, "Give me a pack of cowboy killers." I then add, "Please."
He shrugs and turns around to get me the pack of cigarettes.
"Why so foul?" a voice behind me asks.
I don't turn around. "I just fired my only employee. Not much of a loss, but…" I shrug. "I'm still stuck running the shop for another ten hours by myself."
The man behind me doesn't respond, so I think our conversation is done.
I grab a lighter and smack it down on the counter. The clerk hands me the cigarettes and I give him the money that I owe. I grab my purchases and fling myself out from the convenience store and into the open air, ripping at the plastic wrapping the box. The box free, I quickly tap it on my palm and pull out a cigarette before stashing the rest in my pants pocket. Slowly, I begin to walk back to the bakery, attempting to light the cigarette, but the lighter won't catch.
I stop. Cupping my hand around the tip of the cigarette and lighter, I try once more to light it. The flame clicks to life and I suck on the filter, wisps of smoke escaping my mouth as the flame catches on the end of the cigarette. I sigh to myself, bringing down my hands, smoke billowing up from me. I flick the cigarette in my hand, ash flying off of it.
"Hey, did you need help?"
I turn around. "Excuse me?" I say, brow furrowing as a guy with the shaggiest blond hair I've ever seen jogs up to me.
"With your shop, I mean." It's the man that was behind me in line at the convenience store.
"Oh," I say. And that's just it. "Oh." I can't think of anything else to say but, "Oh"? I'm retarded. I shake my head.
He takes this as an answer. "Are you sure?" he asks, scratching at the back of his neck.
"What?" I say stupidly. Oh jeez, I'm not even really following my own damn conversation. It's his turn for his brow to furrow, and an "Uh" escapes his lips. He slumps a little and looks away as I catch on. "Why, you want to help out at my shop?" I ask him.
"If you don't mind!" he says, looking back at me with relief washing over his face. "I just paid off my debt to the Lumpy Pumpkin, so right now I'm kind of out of a job," he admits to me.
"Lumpy Pumpkin?"
He explains, "It's a rest stop for travelers between here and Ordon."
"Oh," I say softly. I look around the street awkwardly. "Uh, so what was the debt?" I ask him as I turn around and continue my walk back to work.
"I smashed their custom chandelier," he says jogging to catch up with me before falling in step.
"You smashed a chandelier?" I ask aloud. "I don't know if I want you near my ovens. I haven't finished paying for them yet."
His interest piques a little. "Ovens?"
I glance over at him. "I run a bakery."
"What do you bake?" he asks, genuinely interested, blue eyes shining.
"Everything. I'm a jack of all trades right now," I tell him. "But I really like making cakes. I'd like to make that the one thing I do one day, but for now…" I trail and shrug. "The town needs bread, and I got to make some money." I sniff a little and take another drag on my cigarette, calming down from the earlier events. "What's your name, by the way?"
"Oh!" he says, eyebrows rising. I roll my eyes. What a space case, but I suppose he's better than nothing. He smiles at me and tells me, "I'm Link."
"Link…?"
"Mason. Link Mason," he says cheerfully. I suppose he's just happy to have some work to do. The goddesses know I need someone to help me out. I hope you know what you're sending me up there! "What's yours?" he asks.
"Zelda Nohansen," I yawn. I flick the cigarette again and take a drag.
When the bakery comes in sight, Link asks, "Are you from around here?" I dig around in my apron pocket for my keys. "This it?"
"Yeah," I mumble. I roll the cigarette out and then stamp on the burning ashes before unlocking the door. Then I answer his original question, "And no, not from here. I moved here from Castle Town about a year ago." I open the door and the familiar jingle of my shop's own bells sound as I step in. Link follows me in, looking around the place. I flip the sign to "OPEN".
"You seem tired," he comments. "What time do you come in usually?"
"I'm here at four," I say, thinking nothing of it and pushing past him as I head into the back area to get him Ingo's old apron.
Link, however, is completely shocked. "Four? In the morning?" he exclaims coming to a sudden stop.
"In the morning," I call back. I hear him shuffle after me, and when I come out of the office area, he's inspecting the bread racks. "Here," I say, handing him the apron. "Put it on." I scrunch my face and give him a good look over.
"What?" Link frowns at me as he puts the apron, noticing my inspection of him.
"Wear a hat tomorrow," I tell him as he ties the ends of the apron together in the front. Gosh, he's pretty lanky under those clothes.
"A hat?"
"Yes, a hat. A thing that goes on top of that head of yours," I say, waving my hand around the crown of my own head. "Your hair is so scraggly, and I don't need it falling on my stuff. Keep it contained."
He chuckles softly and nods, his crystalline eyes sparkling. Excitedly, he says, "Okay!"
"Also, with this floor, you're going to need some slip resistant shoes," I inform him. "They'll have these little 'x' patterns on the soles." I pull up a couple of stools by the cash register and sit down on one. "Take a seat," I tell him, patting the other stool.
"You don't want to get to work on the bread?"
"Eh, some of it still needs to cool," I say uninterested. "Besides, if you're working here, we got to get some stuff out of the way, right?" I smile cheekily at him, and he laughs.
"Sure." He slides himself up on the stool. "Is it always slow in the mornings?"
"Yeah," I say. "Except around the holidays. I never thought this place would get so slammed last year."
"So what do you do?"
"Bag bread," I say simply. "There's a lot of task work to do in the mornings, but I'm not going to lie. I'm feeling a bit lazy this morning after that phone call."
"Phone call?" Link inquires. "You fired the other guy over the phone?" At least he can catch on quick. I guess?
"He called me saying he had a hundred and fifty degree temperature," I inform him flatly. Then I feel the corners of my mouth tug, and I can't hold it back. I begin to giggle, and Link starts to laugh with me. "Isn't that the stupidest thing you ever heard?"
Once our laughter subsides, Link looks over at me and says, "So a hat and slip resistant shoes?"
"Yup," I say. "You can wear what you like." After a pause, I add, "Well, within reason."
"I'm a t-shirt and jeans kind of guy."
"Don't wear anything you're too fond of," I say. "Whatever you don't get on your apron is on your clothes, and some of the chemicals here have bleach in it."
Link shrugs. "They're just clothes. I'm not too attached to a plain green shirt."
I glance down at the register. Pointing at it, I tell him, "This is a manual. You're going to have to count back change yourself." I stare him down for a moment, and he actually straightens a little under my level glare. "Don't fuck it up."
He pauses before breaking out a smile for me. Link laughs and says, "I can do that. The Lumpy Pumpkin wasn't quite up to date either."
I snicker. "I do have a credit card machine, so I'm not totally in the dark ages."
"Like an actual machine?"
"Yeah, just punch in the amount and swipe."
Link lets out a sigh. "Oh thank Farore. I had to fill out slips back at the Pumpkin and do the manual swipe. I can't tell you how many times I had people tell me, 'Oh, wow. I haven't seen one of those in twenty years!'" He snorts a little at this before saying, "I'd be a very rich man if I got a rupee for every time I heard that one."
We share a chuckle at this before Link asks, "Do you make everything here?"
"Basically," I say. "I usually finish baking around this time with exception of what goes in that case over there," I tell him pointing at the bread bar. "The boules and batards that sell most go in there. Below it goes the loaves and other kinds of bread I bake in the mornings; I do two a day usually unless they don't sell."
"When do you make the dough?"
"Afternoons when there aren't any cake or pastry orders or extras for the cases that need to be filled," I say, shrugging. "What we'll do is later today is make some dough. We'll have to separate the dough first into the individual loaves or rolls and then freeze them." I yawn again, thinking over the day's work ahead of us. "We could probably par-bake some of the bread bar stuff too."
"Par-bake?" Link questions, brow furrowing.
"It's when the dough gets proofed and then baked about halfway. We can freeze it after that and finish baking it when it comes time to use it."
I glance over at Link, and in the corner of my eye, I see his own slide upwards as he takes in what I've said. Then he nods, smirking a little. What a goof.
"So that's how you keep on top of everything," Link says. "I was wondering how you keep a bakery running with just two people."
I shrug. "It's a lot of work," I admit aloud.
Link smiles sheepishly at my statement and laughs. I twitch an eyebrow. "You're here how long out of the day?" he asks me.
I scrunch my nose before replying, "Eh, like fourteen hours." Pause. "I essentially live here. I don't know why I bother to rent a house." I glance behind me. "I suppose I could set up a cot between the dishwasher and freezer."
Link laughs heartily at this. He says jokingly to me, spinning himself around on the stool, "Your boyfriend must be mad you never have time for him."
I snort. "You're right," I tell him before chuckling a little. "That's why he doesn't exist."
We're both still giggling with each other when the bells jingle. We both try to stifle our laughter as we greet the customer.
Now here's my chance to see if good ol' godsend Link is worth his weight in rupees.
Heeey guys. Haha, been a while, huh? And of course, instead of working on finishing up the older stuff, I start something new. I've actually begun working into the third chapter of this and finishing up revising the second, but there are a couple of things I'd like some input in.
First, I have no idea what to name the bakery, and it's eating at me that I have to continually refer to it as "the bakery" in the story. I tried thinking up some clever pun or something, but to no avail. So guys! Any ideas for a name?
Second, I'm not too sure about the title of the actual story. Yes, Zombie Cake is a legit cake made where I work. It's a rum flavored bunt cake with sliced almonds and cherries in it. It's interesting to say the least. I felt like I was settling for the title.
Anyhoo! I will post the second chapter sometime soon, but I'd still love to hear any thoughts you might have that may help improve the second chapter before I get too deep into the third.
;D
