The Middleman.

ORDER #005

x1 THE COSMIC PLATE

x1 BITTER SODA

GUESTS SEATED: [UNKNOWN]

He sat in his leather desk chair, brows furrowed tight, polishing his nametag with aggressive intent. It had to be pristine. That was the ritual.

Peculiar, really, considering the condition of the thing: there was no name on it. Where a name should’ve been, the metal had been brutally carved out; scraped away in short, deliberate strokes by someone who knew exactly how much pressure it would take. Not rage. Something uglier. Something practiced.

He never gave a name, so the townsfolk gave him one. Voidson. Proud Shift Manager at Jink’s. He’d been here for decades, and wouldn’t leave for anything.

Can’t.

Voidson is unusual in a way people learn not to ask about. He’s not an open book, but a blank one — its spine uneven where chapters once were. There’s no beginning or end to this man. But there is the middle. And only he knows what happened there.

He stood with a grunt, joints crackling softly like a radio being tuned, and moved around the desk towards the mirror mounted on the back of the office door.

Close. Too close. He pinned the nametag to the top-right of his button-up shirt — surgical, careful.

In his left back pocket:

• one peppermint swirl in a clear wrapper.

• a small shard of rusted steel.

• a crumpled receipt dated the 17th with no month nor year, from a world that doesn’t exist anymore.

They were all he had when he first stepped into the Diner — relics of a past life. The pocket had kept them ever since — undisturbed.

His office was square-shaped and relatively small. Barren by design; there was only his desk, his chair, the punch-clock, and a single filing cabinet stuffed with shift logs that stretched farther back than anyone bothered to count.

The desk matched the dark wood of the diner booths out front. On its surface sat a pen pot, a clipboard stacked with forms, and an empty mug ringed faintly at the base.

Behind him, to the left, the punch-clock hung on the wall, its chrome face was dulled with use. Some days it ticked louder than necessary, and others like a distant echo, marking time out of habit more than necessity; the hands moved, but nothing in the room seemed to listen.

Voidson punched in every day without fail. No one else was required to. Just him. He liked the routine. Never tired of it. The machine always accepted the stamp, obedient as everything else in the room.

Nothing else hung on the walls. No certificates. No notices. No photographs. They were painted a solid Stratosphere Blue, suffocating and cold. They soaked up the light rather than reflecting it, making the room feel heavier than its size suggested. The air carried that same weight, dense and unmoving, as though the room preferred things to stay exactly where they were.

Staring into the mirror, he lingered, fixated a moment too long on the way light glistened in the gouges of his nametag. Tiny flares — brief and sharp. Like distant sparks of memory, gone as soon as they appeared. His jaw tightened before he realized it.

Then his gaze snapped upward to meet his own.

He pivoted slowly and walked back to the desk with deliberate calm, sinking back into the chair, leather sighing beneath him. Still, he stared straight ahead.

Same mirror. Same man. Only now, there was a distance between them.

Voidson liked that. Distance meant control.

Voidson trusted mirrors because they behaved. They didn’t pry. They didn’t dig. They took what was offered and returned it intact. No interest. No debt.

People like to pretend mirrors are confrontational — witnesses, they think, not accomplices. Voidson knew better. A mirror did not ask for atonement. No matter what churned beneath the floorboards of memory, the reflection never resisted. Self-awareness was simply information. What you did with it was optional.

He had never known a version of himself that didn’t watch. Especially when he was alone. Some things festered if left unwatched.

One hand rested on the edge of the armrest; the other hovered over his coffee mug, thumb slowly circling the rim of a cup that hadn’t held coffee in weeks. The room was silent, save for that constant low hum of fluorescent lights that didn’t care whether he noticed them or not. Sometimes, in that silence, he thought he heard something moving in the vents — not searching or trapped or anything — just passing through.

Above him, the lights flickered once. Then again.

He didn’t flinch.

That’s when Darla knocked. Twice. Soft — the way you’d tap on a fish tank.

Voidson didn’t say come in, but the door opened anyway.

“Here you are,” Darla said, voice breezy as ever. “You’ve got a case of the glazed eyes again. I brought you something bitter to even it out.”

He didn’t look at her, not right away. Just stared through her, through the room, through the very idea of being perceived. But his hand reached for the mug.

“Had another dream about the freezer?” She asked.

He blinked. A small shift. His attention finally settled on her.

“I don’t dream.” was all he said.

Darla set the tray down gently, handing him the mug and carefully placing the plate on his desk. Even straight from the kitchen, the room had already claimed it — its warmth vanishing almost instantly. She took the empty mug back onto the tray.

“Well,” she said, “wherever you just came from, you left the air-con running in the side hall.”

Voidson didn’t respond.

“You gonna be okay for the Meridian Shift꙳?” she asked, head tilting ever-so-slightly.

“I’m always okay in the middle,” he said, already staring past her again. And with that, he picked up the mug, sipped the bitter, and gave a brief nod.

Darla’s cue to leave.

“Well then, chief. Let me know if there’s anything else I can get ya.”

She flashed her dazzling smile and spun on her heel. The door clicked shut behind her.

Voidson watched the foam gather and thin along the surface. Tiny bubbles swirled and vanished without sound.

He looked once more to the mirror. Just in case anything had shifted while he wasn’t looking.

— END OF ORDER —

Subtotal: ???

TIME: An echo of itself.

Thank you! Come again ☺

𓇼 ࿔*:･ﾟ𓆝 ⋆｡𖦹°‧.ೃ࿔*

꙳Meridian Shift: A liminal window of heightened activity within the endless twilight of Jink’s Diner, where orders pile up and the hum of conversation and clatter of dishes swell like tides.

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