Closing Shift – Eliana Gruvman

February 14, 2026

“Just get in the box.”

It was 1:37 am. Her pants smelled like spilled white wine and cooking steak jus. Her hands were sticky from wiping down the bar tops, loose like dish rags.

“Come on…”

She had been working since four that afternoon, wrapped up tight in her uniform suspenders and black suit pants, her stomach slivered by the tie of the apron and its own emptiness. She was tired, grimy, gutless. Lea knew exactly what she would eat as soon as she was done with the closing shift. She would start with a crescent roll stolen from a half-eaten breadbasket. She would hide it in the pouch of her apron and gulp it- coquettishly stale- on her 20-minute walk home. Once she was inside her apartment, the door unlocked and her steps silent to not wake up her roommates, she knew she had half of a block-party-sized bag of vegan cheddar popcorn. It was crumpled up on top of the refrigerator, and she could have handfuls of that, and she could pick off a corner of the chocolate chip coffee cake that her roommate had bought and seemingly forgotten about, and she could unseal the bag of frozen strawberries that crept into her gums and bones and then a cup of mint tea to warm herself back up.

“Please,” he interrupted. Lea scolded herself, again, for not living in the present, for living in the protracted, imagined consumption of her mind.

He should have been easy to focus on.

Jamison ran a hard-edged hand through his hair. He had the kind of head that belonged on a medieval tapestry, all tawny hair and a painstakingly stitched complexion. He had the kind of skin that she moisturized for, blemish free.

“Lea,” he crooned.

Was he pleading?

“Lea, you’re the only one.”

He was the conquering hero turning toward home, the head of a slain unicorn a trophy in his hand.

Jamison trained Lea when she first started at Merlin’s Castle, three months ago. He was the most senior bartender, but the managers still liked to have him train new servers, since he’d been on staff since the Castle had first hewn its false drawbridge six years ago. He walked her through the service stations. He stacked three plates along her goose-bumped arms. He showed her how to open a nice bottle of wine without a table of men offering to help her with the twist, sweetie.

At the bar station, he showed her where to pick up drinks, where the garnishes sat neatly stacked for old fashioneds and Circe’s Brews (jungle juice and blue curaçao by a fancier name).

“Servers are expected to garnish their own drinks, here, since the bar gets so busy. But I know you guys get slammed too. I’ll help you out as much as I can,” he smiled.
And all he wanted was this one thing.

This shift, anyway.

She used to wonder what had kept Jamison at Merlin’s Castle for so long. The Castle was nothing more than an upscale Applebee’s with some heavy-handed theming. The tables were a dark cherrywood, the dining room was lit with swaying candles, and the only way to get to the cramped (never properly stocked with toilet paper) bathroom was to enter through a door disguised as a gluey bookcase. Since she started working at the Castle, Lea found herself shocked to see fluorescent lights on the subway or in grocery stores. How had Jamison lasted six years in a place where you couldn’t pee without a “my liege” and a passcode?

Three months in, Lea was still shocked at how exclusive the Castle was, how cliquish it felt. There was a strict dress code- jackets, ties, and spiffed-up shoes for the men. Women wore evening wear, often gowns with corseted backs and glitter-tinged trains. Their heels clacked along the purposefully rough-hewn floorboards and clicked against trap doors. To even get a reservation, you had to be on the list. The Mage’s Scroll.

The Mage’s Scroll, (in reality), was an excel spreadsheet on the greased-up night manager’s ancient desktop computer. But, if you weren’t on the scroll, or if you weren’t recognizable from reality TV or sleeping with someone who was, you had to wait outside the gilded door of Merlin’s Castle. Hordes of hungry would-be diners, dressed in satin and tucked into cummerbunds, queued for hours for the chance to spend $45 on an overcooked filet. Bouncers in jewel-toned, vaguely apothecarial robes glowered at them. They still waited.

“You’re not going to try?” Jamison tried a different tone now. It was the tone he used whenever they were closing together, when Lea was tired, and her heels ached, and she felt disgusting in her heavy pants and limpid white button down. When their manager was upstairs tapping away at his calculator and the tip pool, when the other servers had already totaled up their tips and rolled their silverware. It was the tone he used when he asked her to brunch or to an after-shift beer, or to be a plus one to his friend’s improv show in a bowling alley.

Why wouldn’t she just try?

She was always so tired, when he asked, mop-headed and wrung out.

She laughed it off, these advances. If you could call them that. If that was what they were. She could hear the laugh coming out of her, could feel it leaving the spring of her throat. She didn’t like the sound of it. It felt as raw as the dough in the Castle’s signature crème pie desert, as grainy as their mashed potato side. Did he hear the difference?

He was gorgeous. Aquiline and roman nosed.

Why couldn’t she just try?

Why couldn’t she, wouldn’t she say yes to just one drink, one breakfast sandwich, one afternoon of seeing each other outside of their staid work uniforms?

He was attractive, sure, and charming in spades and clubs and hearts. But he left her empty, starving. Hungry. She was so, so hungry. She needed to eat something, that would fix it. Maybe when she was full, she would want (to be wanted by) him.

The chef had made burgers for the staff meal, their edges bleeding out onto brioche buns. Lea could no longer stomach red meat. There was a growing list of food that bothered her, that stuck in the mind’s eye of her gullet. It was working at the Castle that did it, scraping fat and gristle from the heavy tines of forks, waking up to the smell of blood and béarnaise on her hands, shoving clods of macaroni and cheese and plods of fried potatoes into industrial sized trash bags.

She had to laugh. Laugh at the advance, at the advances, at the offers and the nudges and the attacks, and they weren’t a problem. And it shouldn’t be a problem. Not when he had been so nice to her.

Jamison had been the one to show Lea how to make garnishes from an orange, the fresh ones she would need for signature drinks. He had taught her how to hold the pocketed skin heavy with its own zest. How to release the scent of summer. He had shown her how to hold the peeler carefully, to cull quickly and without catching her thumb. They made a pile of peelings together. His wrists were so assured, like he understood his body and how it could touch other things, move other things, impact and implode and change them forever. Lea felt false when she held the peeler, as if her fingers were too weak to properly grip it, as if every move she made with it was a playacted performance, a toddler in a plastic house. Pretending, pretending.

If she didn’t laugh, she was presumptuous. Why was she assuming that he wanted something from her? He just wanted to hang out, to talk to her, to get to know her better. What was she assuming? When she laughed, she could still pretend it was funny. If she didn’t laugh, it could all shatter into something serious, something darker.

“You don’t want to help me? This is my chance, Lea. Finally, my turn.”

It was magic that kept Jamison working at Merlin’s Castle.

Magic. Close up magic, specifically. That’s how Merlin’s Castle justified the sawdust taste of their truffled fries and the painful price of their prix-fix. At least four freelance magicians circled the floor at a time. They made dessert forks disappear into patrons’ heavily bejeweled ears, set dress shoes alight, and juggled cocktails without spilling a single maraschino cherry or blue cheese stuffed olive.

On her fourth day of training, when Lea could handle a table or two all on her own, Jamison explained.

“I’ve loved magic since I was six. I know that I could do what those guys do. Better, even. But it’s so hard to get a slot out on the floor.” Jamison looked mournfully at his vodka-scented sleeves as if expecting cream feathered doves to fly out from his cuffs. “I started as a busser, then a waiter, then a barback and now a bartender. Just to be near the magic, to learn what I could.”

Lea pictured him shuffling decks and decks of cards, burning pads of his fingertips with hidden sparks, practicing levitating his book on the subway. Six years of waiting, six years of practicing. Six years of somehow being not quite enough.

“I’m better than half of the hacks they hire. If you can even call those guys magicians. But they still won’t put me on the floor. They just don’t see me that way.”

Lea watched how he moved with a cocktail shaker, his liquid confidence. There was a kind of magic to that too. She didn’t see how such power couldn’t translate, wouldn’t translate to the dining room floor, to his actual ambitions. But maybe things were easier behind the protective plane of the bar.

“C’mon, Lea. This is the kind of trick that will make them take notice.”

He wanted to saw her in half. It wasn’t just a date or a kiss or a plus one or a social buffer or an attention source now. He wanted her to climb into a sawdust crusted, flimsily painted plywood box. He wanted her to stick her non-slip shoe clad feet in one end and her split-end hair out the other and wait for him to notch a saw into her middle and start to gnaw. Back and forth. Back and forth.

It was a classic trick, the kind that the purists would approve of, but it was still splashy enough to hopefully enthrall the lay people, the casual fans. She could see how hard Jamison had thought about this, how badly he wanted this to work, how terribly he needed to be noticed.

And all he wanted from her was to get in. She wanted to sit down. She wanted to go home. She wanted to take off her ugly suit pants. She wanted to eat something that wasn’t a granola bar or a handful of bar nuts or a snack that her roommate wouldn’t miss.

It wasn’t even her that he wanted. He just needed a girl, any girl in the box. He was pursuing a body to fill a space, the same way that it wasn’t Lea he wanted sitting on the barstool next to him or Lea that he wanted at his roommate’s one man show or Lea, herself, that he wanted to see freed from her uniform. He was looking for someone to fill a gap.

It was why she kept saying no. It was why she was so hungry, so tired, and they still had to sweep the wax-stained floors and put the brocade chairs up onto the tabletops.

If she pleased him, she was making progress. If she got in the box, it would end.

She was so empty.

“Please.”

He kept the box beneath the bar, propping up an empty keg and a smaller box of limes.
It would be easier to just get in. To stop saying no. To stop her stomach and her mind and the waiting for someone who didn’t want to just fill a gap.

And didn’t he deserve a chance at his dream? She didn’t even know what her dream would be, anymore.

“Just get in the box.”

He hauled it out from behind the bar and set it in the center of the dining room, in between a four top and the prime, plush booth by the bathrooms.

Lea untied her apron from around her waist. She pulled her hair down from its service-approved ponytail. Jamison smiled, the smile he had always promised her, the smile waiting to be won. He took the lid off of the box, a lid he had clearly painted himself, and Lea knew she should feel flattered.

She put a sensible shoe in and then another. She lay down.

“Are you okay?” he asked, and he lowered the cardboard lid down over her body. She nodded into the darkness. Her stomach rumbled. She tried not to think of her abandoned bread roll, of the artisanal popcorn.

She waited. In the darkness, she wouldn’t see him lift the gilded saw, wouldn’t see it notch against the edge of the cardboard box, wouldn’t see the box begin to give, wouldn’t see…

He sawed her in half. And Lea wasn’t hungry anymore.