Finger Food

“Listen up, Skid. After last weekend’s fiasco, we cannot afford for you to screw anything up again, okay?”

“I told you to stop calling me that,” Skid says. “And it wasn’t my fault—”

“You’re a kid, and you’re a screw-up,” Carlton says. “A screw-up kid. Skid. Get it? And I bet you leave skid marks in your drawers, so it works multiple ways.”

“I wasn’t the one who spilled the olive oil,” Skid defends.

“I know you’re not suspecting me,” Carlton returns. “And I wasn’t the one who crashed into the bride with a full pot of hot chili.”

“I wasn’t the one who put chili on the menu at a damn wedding, or decided that brides should wear white!”

“I wasn’t the one who—”

“Gentleman!” a shrill voice cuts in. The wedding planner’s fierce eyes are glaring over the space between her arched eyebrows and the top of the frame of her glasses. She has a clipboard in one hand with her other resting sharply on her hip. Her pencil skirt and tense posture make her look like a principal about to suspend someone.

“Yes, Mrs. Curtshire,” Carlton says, standing to attention. He adjusts the black bow tie on his neck, which his double chin has knocked crooked.

“Your Majesty,” Skid says with a curtsy.

“Skid!” Carlton quietly chastises him.

“I told you my name is—”

“Gentleman,” Mrs. Curtshire cuts in again. “Please provide me with an updated ETA on the estimated time of arrival of the appetizers. How fresh are the oysters?”

“You know, you don’t have to say estimated time of arrival when you already said ETA,” Skid says. Carlton discreetly kicks his ankle.

“Did you just kick me?” Skid not-so-discreetly says.

“No, I—”

“Gentleman! The oysters!”

“They’re very fresh, Your Maj—Mrs. Curtshire,” Skid corrects himself, feeling Carlton’s glare. “They’re being plucked from the ocean as we speak.” He can’t help himself.

“I am not fond of jokes, if that is what you are attempting.” Mrs. Curtshire glares at Skid.

“Something we can agree on,” Carlton says with a smile. Truthfully, there’s some heat to his tone. He and Mrs. Curtshire got off on the wrong foot as soon as he arrived. Someone forgot to reserve parking for the catering vans, and she refused to take the blame. They had to park in the fire lane and already got a ticket. Things are not going so well thus far, but Carlton is determined to turn the tide.

“Look,” Carlton says, pointing to a server carrying a tray of oysters. “They’re on their way out now.”

“Right,” she says. “And the rest of the seafood?”

“We’ll sea to it right away,” Skid winks.

Mrs. Curtshire stares at him blankly, then turns on her heel and walks away.

“Boy, she’s crabby.” Skid can’t withhold a giggle. “Mrs. Curtshire? More like Mrs. Cun—”

“Shut it!” Carlton spits, stopping him, but he almost smiles. “I’m going to check on the octopus. Make yourself useful.”

“Doesn’t anybody just like a good chicken finger anymore?” Skid says to himself.

Carlton struts into the kitchen while Skid looks around the backstage area of the wedding venue. It’s actually an old theatre, and he finds a top hat and mustache and tries them on. He turns to look for a mirror, and shouts in fright.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Carlton demands. “Everyone knows that the first rule of the theatre is that you do not touch someone else’s props.”

“I thought the first rule was you don’t say Macbeth?”

“Dear God, you fool!” Carlton gasps. “Now you’ve done it.”

“Oh, calm down,” Skid says. “This is a wedding, and that is a myth.”

“Tell that to Rebecca Gladstein.”

“I don’t want to ask who Rebecca Gladstein is, but I know you’re going to tell me anyway, so just get it over with.”

“In my high school drama club’s 1997 production of Chicago, there was a scene in which someone gets hung with a noose. Our brilliant director, Mr. Fletcher, may he rest in peace, staged it as a silhouette behind a screen. Our idiot-stick lead actor, Tom Cedarvale, said the M word that night, and somehow the noose got tied too tightly and—”

“She died live on stage?”

“No, she was fine. But it choked her more than it should have.”

“Oh my God, dude, you needed to let go of that boring story twenty years ago.”

A crash sound and a chorus of gasps takes their attention.

“Is he okay?!” a server shouts.

“He fainted!” another says.

“He’s bleeding!”

“I told you.” Carlton glares at Skid. “Take his place and keep getting those appetizers out.”

Carlton pushes Skid off and slinks through the group of servers. “Get back to work!” he yells. “I’ll take care of this.”

“Of this? He’s a human being!” A server scoffs and walks away.

Skid picks up a tray of oysters to take out to table fourteen. Or was it fifteen? He looks down at the seafood, and thinks if oysters are as tasty as they look, they must be disgusting.

He stops when he notices an acrylic nail under one of the shells. “Damn kitchen staff,” he says. “Who isn’t wearing gloves?”

He ducks behind a curtain and pulls the black-painted nail from under the shell. Except it’s heavy and difficult to get free. Because it’s not just a fingernail. It’s a finger.

Skid withholds a shout but still lets out an audible gasp. The other servers turn to him.

“Sorry,” he says. “There’s a fly in this one.”

He turns over an oyster shell to hide the finger and hastens to find Carlton, where he is finishing up a bandage on the fallen server’s head.

“Why aren’t you serving oysters?” Carlton asks. “Never mind. I need you to get me an ice pack.”

“We have a problem.”

“I know,” Carlton says, gesturing to the server propped up on the stairs. “I’m working on it. And he needs an ice pack.”

“No, you need to come with me.”

“Did I miss the chapter where you became the boss?”

“Fine,” Skid says. He walks away and finds a garbage can. He can’t bring himself to throw the finger in the trash. What if someone else finds it? He wraps it in a napkin and shoves it in his apron pocket.

Whose finger is it, anyway? You’d think if someone cut their finger off, they’d be pretty vocal about it. It wasn’t the server because he’s not actually working with knives, and he doesn’t seem like the kind of fellow that has acrylic nails. Although it would be cool if he did.

Skid heads to the kitchen to grab another tray of oysters. This one has no finger, and he actually remembers that he’s told to take it to table seventeen. He decides not to tell Carlton about the finger because it would only stress him out further, and he might go into cardiac arrest at his old age. Skid doesn’t really know how old Carlton actually is. As he passes tables full of empty oyster shells, he’s scanning for any signs of limbs that aren’t from under the sea.

“Everything taste alright?” he asks a table, and because he doesn’t truly care, he moves onto the next table as they’re halfway through their reply.

“Where’d we travel from tonight?” he asks another table.

“Big oyster lovers over here, I see!” he says to a table of seniors.

“Finger licking good!” One of them replies. That sends a shiver up Skid’s spine.

No other fingers as far as he can tell. He clears a few plates from a few more tables, and when he takes them to the trash, he discreetly rummages through it, just to make no fingers got tossed in there.

“Looking for scraps?” someone asks. It’s the groom.

“No, sir,” Skid says. “I dropped my pen. That’s all.”

“I’m just kidding! Food is great.” He slaps Skid on the shoulder and hands him his plate of empty oyster shells.

Skid dumps the shells from the several plates into the garbage and collects the plates to return them to the kitchen.

“Thanks for getting me the ice pack,” Carlton says to him sarcastically.

“I didn’t—oh. Sorry, I forgot.”

“Of course you did. Now what was your problem earlier?”

“Oh, it was nothing. I dealt with it.”

“You dealt with something? That must mean it requires my follow-up.”

“Oh my god,” Skid says, looking at the floor. The crashing sound when the server fainted was him dropping his tray of oysters. And under the freezer where they rolled, Skid spots a second finger.

“Oh yeah, clean that up, would you?”

Skid quickly ducks down before Carlton spots it. He scoops up the oysters and the finger, dumps the oysters into the trash, and wraps the second finger with the first and tosses it back into his apron pocket.

Two fingers. That means there’s probably more. That means it’s deliberate. Skid vomits into the trash can. Thankfully, nobody notices, as far as he can tell.

Skid locks himself in the accessible stall of the men’s washroom. He pulls the fingers out from his pocket again. For the first time, he realizes he hasn’t washed his hands since he touched them and been serving food. Any sensible person would call the police. We’ve obviously got a crime on our hands. But after Chili-Gate, he’s not having the police show up for a potential murder investigation in the middle of the cake-cutting ceremony.

Would it be a murder investigation? Is it a murder? He looks at the fingers again. It’s hard to tell, but it looks like it might be an index finger and a pinky. It’s certainly not a thumb. The one that looks like an index finger has a tiny black rose tattoo on it. The other one looks like a pinky because of its size, but it’s possible it’s just a ring finger cut short. Who is cutting off someone’s fingers, and why? And where is the rest of the body? He has to find out before it ruins this wedding. Skid is panting.

“Everything okay in there?” a familiar voice asks.

Skid wraps the fingers back up and puts them in his apron pocket again. “All good!” He opens the door. It’s the groom again.

“Take a breath, my man. You guys are killing it.” He heads for the door. “Don’t forget to wash your hands!”

Skid forces a laugh and then washes his hands in scalding hot water before washing them again, and then a third time. He’s supposed to be the assistant to the catering manager, and now he’s the head detective in a possible murder investigation. And he has to figure it out before someone else finds a thumb in their octopus. What’s the purpose behind hiding the fingers in the food, anyhow? Is there more than just fingers? Skid might be sick again.

Main courses are being served, and Skid is doing his best to scan each plate as it goes out, looking for anything that resembles body parts that aren’t meant to be eaten. With all the seafood, it’s difficult to tell the difference. He almost pounces on a plate with eel, thinking it is, well, something else. Then he remembers that the fingers belong to a woman. He’s so on edge, he bumps into a server and knocks his black baseball cap off. Carlton would be livid if he saw that one of his staff was wearing a Bass Pro Shops hat on the job. Even Skid isn’t that unprofessional. He apologizes and hands him back his hat.

In the kitchen, Skid sticks his head in the freezer, hoping the cold air will combat the hot panic creeping up his collar. His face is as red as the lobster being prepared, and sweat is dripping off his brow and turning to ice. His breathing finally slows, and his heart returns to a normal rate. Until he notices a thumb at the back of the freezer. He quickly grabs another napkin, wraps it up and reunites it with its missing counterparts. The weird thing is that the thumb isn’t frozen, yet it’s in the freezer. That means it was only placed in here recently. Whoever is doing this wants them to be found. Whoever is doing this is at the wedding.

Carlton is standing with Mrs. Curtshire, and they’re at war over which clipboard-wielding diva has the upper hand.

“I’ve told you before, and I’ll tell you again,” Carlton says in a firm but calm tone. “Catering is not responsible for the floral arrangements. Unless they’re edible. Are the floral arrangements edible, Mrs. Curtshire?”

“They are not—”

“Fantastic,” Carlton says. “So I believe the wilting hydrangeas are your responsibility.” He points a finger at her.

“Get that finger out of my face unless you’re prepared to lose it,” she snaps and turns to walk away, mumbling, “It’s time for speeches, and I’ll be damned if they don’t thank me.”

The bride and groom are standing together at the podium, flanked by their seated wedding parties. She is wearing her mother’s frumpy wedding dress from probably 1990, and it looks its age. The groom is wearing a tuxedo indiscernible from any other tuxedo any man has ever worn in the history of men wearing tuxedos.

The bride starts by thanking Mrs. Curtshire, who then comes to the front of the room to adjust the microphone higher to the bride’s mouth. Truthfully, it wasn’t necessary, and Carlton thinks she just wanted a moment in the spotlight. She gives a little wave before returning to the shadows.

“Lastly, I’d like to thank my mom,” the bride says. “I can’t see her out there with all the lights, but she has bent over backwards to make this day happen. I mean, she single-handedly kept my ex-boyfriend from cashing the rehearsal dinner. Two weeks ago, we got matching rose tattoos on our fingers because she always gave me roses on Valentine’s Day until I met Dalton. Now, we will forever have roses from each other.”

Skid comes running out from the kitchen, nearly crashing into Carlton who is standing at the side watching the speeches. “Oh my god.”

“Beautiful, right?” Carlton whispers.

Skid’s eyes zero in on the bride’s finger with the black rose tattoo, like a crash zoom in a Quentin Tarantino film. It’s the same rose tattoo that is in his pocket on a dismembered finger. “Oh my god.”

“And now, time for cake cutting!” the bride squeals. “And I swear to God, Dalton, I know it’s tradition, but if you shove so much as a crumb of cake on my beautifully beat face, just know, there is a knife within reach.” Everyone laughs.

Until the bride screams. Not just a light scream. A blood-curdling scream. Before he even can see it, Skid knows. There’s a finger in the cake. Right between the bride and groom miniatures. And everybody has seen it.

Skid begins to panic. He’s kept this whole finger fiasco to himself, hoping to avoid incident, but it’s too late now. What was his plan for when he collected all five fingers? Is there even five? So far, this makes four. What if there’s more, or worse—toes?

“Someone call 911!” the bride screams. She’s not yet aware of whose finger it actually is, and Skid doesn’t think he can stick around for that reaction. Not to mention, if the police arrive and he’s got three fingers in his pocket, he will certainly be viewed as the prime suspect.

Skid pulls the fingers out of his pocket. “Here.” He hands them to Carlton and hastily unties his apron.

“This is not the time for a snack, Skid,” he says, opening the napkin. “What in the—” Skid is gone by the time Carlton looks back up.

When the police arrive, Carlton hands them the three dismembered fingers.

“And what did you say his name was again?” an officer asks.

“Um, well—” Carlton says. “I don’t know, actually.”

“You don’t know your assistant’s name?”

“I never bother to learn them. They usually only last for a few shifts. I call him Skid.”

“I imagine you had to have him fill out some sort of hiring paperwork, no?”

“Actually, I was paying him under the table.” Carlton winces.

“So we have an undocumented employee with no background check, and an irresponsible manager who is breaking the law?” the officer questions. “You do realize how suspicious that makes you look, right?”

“Call me a criminal, call me a slur, but irresponsible, I am not.”

“You were responsible for the food, am I correct?”

“Correct.”

“And how many human fingers do you typically serve in your dishes?”

“We had nothing to do with this, I swear. Or at least I didn’t.”

“So we’re looking for a suspect named Skid,” the officer says into his radio, rolling his eyes. “Don’t think you’re off the hook either, Fresh Prince.”

Carlton doesn’t bother correcting that Will is the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, not Carlton.

Mrs. Curtshire is convinced that it’s entirely Carlton and Skid’s doing, and Carlton is unconvinced that Mrs. Curtshire is free of guilt herself. Carlton is also not convinced of Skid’s innocence, either. He is a screw-up kid, but is he a psychopath murderer, too?

“There’s a body!” Another officer comes running in. “In the bride’s dressing room shower.”

The squad, along with Carlton and Mrs. Curtshire, run up the stairs to the dressing room.

“Oh my god!” Mrs. Curtshire screams. “It’s her mother!”

Lying on top of the body is a black and white printed photo of the bride with someone who is not her husband. It can only be assumed that it is the ex-boyfriend of the bride since the attached note reads:

I told you. You should have married me.