Page 7 of Orc'd & Loaded
I remove the first rack at 12:15. The bones slide clean. The bark, that dark crust of spice and smoke and patience, crackles when I press my thumb against it. Juice pools on the cuttingboard. I hack the rack into individual ribs with three sharp chops of the cleaver, pile them onto a wagon wheel-sized wooden platter, and carry it to the communal table with both hands above my head.
"EAT!"
They eat.
And then the door doesn't stop opening.
By 12:30 the communal table is full, and people stand along the walls holding plates. By 12:45 the line reaches the sidewalk. A bead of sweat rolls from my temple into my eye and I wipe it with the back of my hand, leaving a streak of char across my forehead. The hearth needs more wood. The outdoor smoker needs turning. The bread is browning too fast in the brick oven I installed in the back corner, and the slaw -- the slaw is fine, the slaw takes care of itself, that's why slaw exists.
I sprint outside.
The smoker lid groans as I heave it open. Inside, the brisket has been going since three in the morning. Twelve hours of low heat and applewood and silence. The fat cap has split into a crosshatch of golden cracks, and the probe thermometer reads 197. Close. Not yet. I rotate the grate, close the lid, adjust the damper by a quarter turn.
Back inside. More wood. The axe sings. CRACK. CRACK. CRACK. Three splits in nine seconds and I'm through the door again with an armful, feeding the hearth, stoking the coals, pulling the bread just before the crusts go from dark to black.
A woman at the communal table picks up a rib with both hands. Sauce on her chin. Sauce on her wrists. She locks eyes with the stranger beside her and they both start laughing, the kind of laughter that only happens when your hands are too dirty to cover your mouth.
This. This is the thing. Not the food alone. The mess. The shared table. The stranger becoming a neighbor over a bone picked clean.
The front door swings open again. I glance up, hands full of split oak, face streaked with soot.
A woman in a pristine white chef coat perches at the door. Arms crossed. Clipboard against her ribs.
Not the same coat. A new one.
Solene Rostova surveys the chaos of my dining room like a health inspector arriving at a crime scene.
She doesn't sit. She doesn't order. She stands in my doorframe for exactly four seconds, her gaze cataloguing every violation like a camera with opinions, and then she turns on her heel and walks back across the street.
The door swings shut behind her. A draft pulls smoke from the hearth sideways, and the construction workers cough.
I move the oak logs.
My hands are shaking, and it takes me a moment to understand why. Not anger. Something adjacent to it, something that lives in the same neighborhood but pays higher rent.
Respect.
That woman has barbecue sauce dripping... she does not cry. She does not shriek. She plants both palms... and she launches me backward. into my own smoker with the force of a woman who has been disrespected by the universe one too many times and has decided to start hitting back.
I rub the spot on my sternum where the clipboard landed. Still tender.
"Boss? The ribs are backing up."
That's Pim, my dishwasher, a half-orc kid with arms like pipe cleaners and a work ethic that borders on religious. He stands at the pass window holding an empty platter, eyes wide.
"More ribs. More bread. Borog handles the rest."
He vanishes. I feed the hearth. I grab the brisket at 198 degrees, wrap it in butcher paper, and let it rest on the cutting board. I serve forty-seven more people. I split more wood. I refill the slaw twice.
But the whole time, my brain circles back to the coat.
At 2:30 the lunch rush dies. The communal table looks like a battlefield. Bones everywhere, sauce pooled in the wood grain, napkins balled and abandoned like tiny white flags of surrender. I love it. I wipe my hands on my apron and walk to the back storage room.
The shelf in the far corner holds things from home. Not decorative things. Not sentimental things. Functional things packed in iron boxes and sealed with wax, brought over in my grandmother's trunk when the family crossed through the rift thirty years ago. Dried herbs from the Blackridge Valley. Fermented root paste in clay pots. Salt crystals harvested from cave walls that haven't seen sunlight in ten thousand years.
And the spice.
I kneel. The iron box is the smallest one, no bigger than my fist, and the wax seal bears my clan's mark, a cleaver crossed with a bone. I crack it open with my thumbnail.
