My Job

Prompt: Write about a place that has meaning for you. Use imagery.

It’s a corner rectangle on a block of rectangles. The glowing sign above the double doors invites you to step inside. As soon as you do, the smell of oranges and lemons swirls around your head, prompting deeper breaths. You’re startled by the chorus of “Hi-how-are-yous” that bounce off the walls of the small lobby and then are quickly swallowed by the roar of a quartet of four-speed blenders. The buzz of activity behind the gleaming stainless steel counter is almost exhausting to watch, and your eyes seek the relative calm of the bright green walls and the shelves of books, caps, biking shirts, and insulated mugs. The menu that hovers over the cheerful, eager smiles, the visors, and the aprons offers a dizzying number of choices, each entry containing two or three lines of black-lettered explanation. Even the menu board is a riot of colors.

(narrator shift)

My shoes stick to the floor ever so slightly as I round the end of the counter and step onto the black rubber floor mat. The faint squeaking of the juice machine that flows with orange juice is almost comforting—it means that it’s not broken, and it’s one less worry for me today. I watch the lush green wheatgrass being fed into the top of a machine that looks almost like the head of a dog from the side, with the leftover grass pulp growing from its nose like a green Pinocchio. It smells like a freshly-cut lawn.