Take Out

Every day for five years, twelve hundred plus people came through as loyal customers of the drive window.

The flavors of chives and various kinds of sauces designed for diverse palettes' took hold of the hunger in any given patrons nose, pulling that same hunger in by the fumes that summoned currency from their wallet and into the electric coffer of the establishments central bank that only existed for twenty years, some seven hundred plus years later at an undisclosed location.

The manager had worked here for thirty years.

Most managers need to skim or cook the books in-order to get doubled paid. And often they get fired, or run away with the money.

but the manager of the 'Brass Pear', seemed to be content on the outside. While he was being double paid very well to sit in one era, and get old.

He had his pain to keep him company. In the era he was from he would have been destitute. Most of his life to that point had been plagued with depression, which is anger without enthusiasm.

he suffered from a sexual injury that pinched his sciatic nerve. And it was this constant twinge that now comforted him and chased away the free time for depression with the will to move about despite fairly intense pain. A pain that he learned to laugh at, even while he was riddled sleepless on his apartment floor in the new era he'd been hired to live in.

He was told to seek out help from a physician. But in his era witch craft was a load of trickery for the ill informed and he couldn't bring himself to the point of risking being taken in by it.
So the treatable condition riddled him still as it would any man his age back in his own era.

He was like a dog, staying in a cage after the gates been riped off.

After many years he associated the pain with laughter. Something he didn't allow himself to do before the pain had started in his life. He subconsciously felt that if the pain were to be cured he would run out of excuses to laugh, and be light hearted. Much as if the pain where a magical drug he'd become addicted to a an emotional excuse to be natural.

One morn after wincing all night long laughing at and through his pain in a pj'ed ball, with tears in his eyes from the steady sharp strain a message went off in the device they gave him to remind him of important events. He stretched himself out through the strain and into his work uniform.

And half way through his shift, he saw her for the first time after five years of waiting. He was not in love with her, though you would think so by the joy that crossed his face at the sight of this newest customer. She was not his lover, she was not even his mark. His job was simple. Thirty five years from now; when the six years after the company adds soup to the menu, he is to slip powder that will arrive by registered mail at his home, into her soup and see that she eats it in front of him.

Thirty some years from now, he has to know hr well enough for her to trust him when he asked her to eat in the store rather than going home.

"To do this, I'll have to be her friend. Keep her coming here." So he greeted her with a smile.

"How are you today mai'me, have you decided what you'd like to order?", His back muscles spasmed at the thought of how long and thorough this deception would have to be, as he caught himself from falling backward while he was talking, and the pain kept him from stuttering of getting nerveous.

He saw her the first time she came in, his mark that is. He had watched her grow from a fast adolescent, into acward fifty something.

He was now in his sixties himself and ager to get out of this temporally backward era/ or place.

He'd asked many times for and earlier date to put the drug in her food, but his employers were not on the same time schedule he was, and blindly stuck to a less practical time frame they could understand without putting too much thought into it.

Today was the day.