Absolute Magnitude

The steam wand has never been as magical as it sounds.

For Ezy, the crack and whistle of the steam was a moment of respite. A brief few seconds in which she was relieved of expectation. No need for eye contact. No need to acknowledge a new customer. It was an unspoken window of concentration in which she could exhale and forget why it was she kept doing this.

A crackle of the loudspeaker. Ten minutes to the OB.

The automated voice was crystal in its refined English. So recognisable by this point that Ezy could discern the subtle inflexions between stitched syllables as she whispered along with it.

Her milk was now frothy enough. After this she would have a few minutes in which to halt service and direct her customers back out to the deck before it got dark. She would field a couple of disgruntled rebukes, as always, but in clearing out the tables she always met this result. A cashed up clientele, cruising, their privilege pronounced by ensemble as much as entourage. Not one of them ever liked to be told ‘No’.

Ezy brushed a few stray hairs back over her ear, a series of piercings catching the diminishing light. They were tolerated but her nose ring had to be removed while on shift. Self expression didn’t align with the brand.

The other practiced hand collected a vacuum sealed pouch from the heads, into which she pumped the milk. The black liquid, dramatically toned by a golden crema, was quickly paled as ripples of caffeine shocked outwards with the expanding contents.

“Sugar?” Her tone betraying her disdain.

Five years of study. Towel thrown in on a Master of Fine Arts. The burden of unmentionable cost and rejection and judgement. All of it leading her down the hole of hospitality. How unlike Alice’s this hole was.

She recalled the old conversations, as she always did, when Luke got published for the first time. When Aoife had her first opening and Andrij received his first commission. When Nina came home to say she’d won her first role, a foreign production, and they fought. Each conversation clouding the space between those connections until nothing remained. It wasn’t like she hadn’t tried for success. Nothing ever seemed to go her way though. The bitterness of failure. Time and time again.

The ageing woman in front of the counter turned the edges of her lips upwards as she collected the hot pouch. No words. Nothing more. A feigned grin etched into muscles by a lifetime of such transactions. She the consumer. Ezy the consumed.

Ezy watched the fashionable trail of her coat. Her face she knew from adverts. She had caught the glint of the jewels on the woman’s knuckles, and then seen the moustachioed sack of protein shakes whose arm she was draped off. Even this lot had won out. In genetics. In opportunity. In fame and fortune.

The rest of the crowd dissipated as Ezy shuffled them off. Objections were relatively tame this time. Some carried the coffee in their pouches while she watched carefully at what they left behind, all to the cacophony of an ethereal quartet echoing outside. How desperately she wanted to toss this all in too. To walk out with them. Take a few steps with their ease, their pride in each stride towards the great marvel beyond this little kiosk.

She brushed the hair back over her ear again. It was always the same strands catching. The motion was comforting despite its persistent need. She recalled when other hands brushed them for her.

A voiceless trill echoed from her lips as she blew air across them. She stepped out from behind her counter onto the lonely black and white flooring, the wooden boards reminding her of piano keys. A deliberate aesthetic repeated across all the other ships this brand profited from. Ezy remembered when she first saw the job advertised. Very little skill was required. They wanted personality, which meant they wanted a look. It differed vastly from the poky hole in the wall she had worked at during her studies. Pouches weren’t quite the trend at the time, but with cheaper bioplastics so came a renewed penchant for disposability. Out here it worked, and she hated them for it.

Belonging to a franchise had turned out as humiliating as she suspected. But the pay was better and, at first, the scenery delivered. Though not nearly enough. Most of her time was spent pacing these black and white boards, silence beneath her feet. They weren’t even real wood. Just a composite with a deceiving grain. Like everything and everyone here it was all about aesthetic, the conjured experience. Never authenticity.

Some of her remaining friends had questioned her choice. More than she had. They saw it, perhaps fairly, as giving up, joking that it was as good as Starbucks. That name would have been more fitting. But Ezy just pulled further away. The words ‘selling out’ were used. The same friends became acquaintances. Acquaintances she would no longer acquaint. Those still in the city were working, being creative, being amazing and filling their socials with the kind of content Ezy would have killed for. It seemed only moments ago she had been creative too. She had been adventurous and lithe and full of purpose, ideas, arguments and dreams. She had drawn gazes and smirked flirtatiously with hopes, smoked beneath starry eyes that were puddles people fell in. She had wondered at the world, and laughed and drank wine with wild sorts. Somehow it had all cracked, a house of cards peeling away without gravity, without gravitas.

The figure hugging cut of her jumpsuit was meant to warm as much as enhance. Blacks and blues suited the fleet for which she now sailed. Amongst the pampered and perfect cheeks of those she served she felt nothing more than diminished. Alone. A dying star. Perhaps never sparked.

The loudspeaker again. Two minutes to the OB.

As she pulled the door shut her forehead fell against the plexiglass. The rubber seals engaged and there was the slightest hiss as it pressurised.

Ezy turned back to face the small kiosk with its emptiness, her head resting against the smudge of perspiration her forehead had made. This small space was all she knew up here. An internal void to match the same endlessness outside the ship. Each of the tables held the detritus of the spoils she peddled, all lit by dim amber bulbs. Empty pouches, torn snack bags, soiled serviettes. She could shuffle all this into a waste bag with ease before the final call, but it was the mess on the centre table that caused her eyes to roll. Chocolate cake. Always chocolate. Crumbs scattered that would require a few dozen stern swipes of her sponge considering the long smear of frosting.

After the first few billionaires forayed into orbit the space tourism industry had blown up. Space cruising had become such a huge market that it seemed juvenile, even inappropriate that chocolate cake featured here. Ezy didn’t get what it was about chocolate cake that impressed. The metaphorical waters of the upper atmosphere became well sailed day and night, as much as that meant to anyone, with passengers buying berths in lavish cabins for a week at a time. The kind of money spent was obscene. But almost all of them at some point went for the chocolate cake. Despite their breeding, or their position, or their esteem amongst their fickle kind they always ended up with chocolate on their cheeks like the schoolyard bunch they actually were.

Resupplies were always the worst. The work mounted as whatever new confectionary the brand deemed novel to space farers was trolleyed on board before take off. Half of it was guaranteed to be chocolate cake. Sometimes there was only a short interval after landing to get it all on board. The franchise only deemed it necessary for a single employee to operate the kiosk, and so along with the other retailers on board it was a shit show to get new stock and set up before the next passengers embarked. The fact that there were only two hatches to use and one was always reserved for the pilots, the crème de la crème of astronautical endeavour, impaired this even further. That they needed their own hatch only magnified the distinct tier of class conveyed here. They carried the prestige of commercial pilots from the 1960s, almost a hundred intervening years unable to assuage such pomp.

Ezy wondered whether the pilots ate chocolate cake. She never saw them back here. They were only ever visible when at the gates with their crisp collars and starched suits. They probably did though. Maybe she was the only one of the whole crew, passengers as well, who stared at chocolate cake and understood how much it tried to kill them all on a regular basis.

OB reached in 10, 9, 8…

The Orbital Barrier. A wasted chance for the opulence of vocabulary. The loosely agreed upon demarcation of the edge of space, the Kármán line, the turbopause.

…7, 6, 5, 4…

The automated voice always struggled a little with four. Ezy never understood why. She even articulated the same subtle quaver between the o and the u.

…3, 2, 1.

Here it was.

We have reached the OB.

The thrusters went out. And just like that, so did gravity.

Ezy was as familiar with the sensation as she was the voice that crackled off in the speakers. Contact slipped from the ground, her limbs floating outwards, the loose strands of her hair snaking like a medusa. None if it raised an eyebrow anymore. The same moment of elation felt by the passengers was a suppressed moment of defeat for her. She was as far as could be from the ground, yet weighted more heavily by her baggage.

There was never enough time to get it all done. To clear the rubbish, wipe the tables, sweep the floors before it all lifted off too. Routine too demanding of rigour. Crumbs became airborne, some clinging by mere static to surfaces she could deal with. Others becoming their own constellation to rival the stars around them. She couldn’t see any star from here. No moon. No sun. No glimpse of Earth in those first few seconds of awe. Never. Nothing of deepest space to question the soul and its place in the universe. All she got was a galaxy of chocolate cake, a nebula of icing sugar, the occasional comet of chocolate chip.

All this had to be removed quickly, vacuumed out to an airlock before it could lodge in electrics or enter the oxygen recycling system. Hence the bulkhead hissing shut just before. On more than one occasion an alarm had sounded due to a moist mouthful of chocolate cake shorting out life support. Her pounding heart had been poised to break right out of her chest. The on hand technician had become so accustomed to the seriousness of cake that the dry wit he versed each time only made Ezy more vigilant in her duty.

All of the passengers with their glitz and glam, the fortunes they traded on a few laps of the planet. Not one of them knew that Ezy kept them alive. That if she allowed a single slice out on the main deck then all this could end in an instant.

She couldn’t appreciate the charm of crumbs hanging in the air. They were a danger more serious than that outside the ship. Instead she had to launch herself gently across the room, reaching for the filter lever to begin the purge.

She hated coffee. She hated working hospitality. But she truly hated chocolate cake. The frontier of space had become tacky with tourism, and an increasing film of cake crumbs clung to the planet.

The vent whistled, and out it all went. Always a little more.