Break Room

The cold found her collarbones first. She unsnapped the apron at the neck and the air reached the triangle of skin above her sternum, still throwing heat from the kill floor. Halima sat on the bench nearest the wall and pressed her shoulders flat against cinder block. The block held a different temperature than the air. Denser, slower to release. She could feel her pulse in her wrists, in her throat, behind both knees.

The timer on the wall read 14:38. Red digits, counting backward. Above it, the shift's WBGT reading was posted on a laminated card someone had slid into a plastic sleeve: 94. The number had been in the nineties since June. Nobody looked at it anymore. When the timer reached zero the buzzer would sound and the room would empty and the line would start again.

Around her the break room filled. Vending machines hummed against the far wall: drinks, snacks, and one that dispensed electrolyte packets in four flavors, all of them bad. The overhead fluorescents made everyone look the same kind of tired. Someone had taped a sign above the microwave months ago: NO FISH. Beneath it, in smaller handwriting, someone else had written no fun. Through the double doors the line kept running, chain rattle and the hiss of steam cabinets, the sound the building made when it was working.

Óscar came in from the kill floor with his hard hat under his arm, hair pressed flat and dark with sweat. He sat across from Halima and put both hands on the table, palms down, fingers spread, the way he always did, as if confirming the surface was solid and cool. His knuckles were thick. The chain mail glove had left its grid on his right forearm, small red indentations that would fade in a few minutes.

"Hot," he said.

"Yes."

He meant the floor. The kill floor ran its own climate, twenty degrees above the air outside, which was a hundred and twelve. Steam and blood heat and the animals' warmth leaving them. Óscar had been on the line eighteen years. He'd grown up somewhere dry, and the thing that still got him was the moisture. Dry heat his body understood. The floor's humidity sat on his skin like a second apron he couldn't unsnap.

12:04.

Rosaura came in last, pulling her hair from its net. She worked the cold side, processing, and her fingers were stiff and pale from the fifty-degree air and the damp. She flexed them as she walked, opening and closing her fists. She sat next to Halima and held her hands in front of the nearest vent, letting the break room's warmth loosen her joints.

"My hands," she said to no one.

Halima looked at them. The nails short, clean, slightly blue at the cuticles. Rosaura sweated through her shirt by ten every morning, heavy visible sweat that left salt lines on her collar, and then she'd go back to the cold side and her hands would go numb. Her body shuttled between the two rooms all shift. Too hot, then too cold, and neither one letting her settle.

Aung sat at the end of the bench with his phone, face lit blue-white from below. He'd taken off his hard hat and his hearing protection hung around his neck like a collar. He was reading something, or looking at something, his thumb still against the screen. His shoulders carried a faint rocking he probably didn't notice, the chain speed still in his muscles even here. With his free hand he kept pressing the pad of his thumb into the center of his opposite palm, working at something deep in the tissue. He'd been doing it when he sat down and he was still doing it now, steady and absent, the way a person works a knot they've stopped expecting to release.

10:17.

"Anybody see the highway this morning?" Óscar said. He was peeling an orange, slowly, in one continuous strip. The smell cut through the room's industrial-cleaner baseline, sharp and living.

"Which part."

"By the Cimarron turnoff. The field."

Rosaura looked up. "The corn."

"Used to be corn." He separated a segment. "They pulled the pivot out. Just dirt."

Halima had seen it. She drove past it every morning, the circle of bare ground where the irrigation pivot had traced its arc for decades, the soil a lighter color than the land around it, like a scar still deciding what to become. There were more of those circles every season. Some grew dryland sorghum or sunflowers. Most grew nothing.

"My neighbor," Óscar said, "his well went dry in April. April." He said it the way you'd report a date that belonged to a different story. Wells went dry in August, in September, at the end of the season when the pivots had drawn all summer. Not in April.

Nobody answered. The pulled pivot, the lighter soil, the line still running through the double doors.

Óscar folded the orange peel into a small square, pressing it flat with his thumb. He did this every break. The peel would go in his pocket and at the end of the shift he'd toss it toward the fence where the dirt started. Halima had watched him do it hundreds of times. She'd never asked why. He held the folded square between his fingers now and turned it, and for a moment his face went somewhere the room wasn't. Eighteen summers. The first one he'd lost eight pounds in two weeks and his vision had gone white twice before he learned to drink before he was thirsty. His body had built itself around this building's particular heat the way a tree grows around a wire. The wire was still in there. He could feel the floor in his joints on days off, a faint vibration his wife said she could hear in his sleep, his hands twitching at chain speed against the sheets.

7:33.

Halima closed her eyes. She could feel her heartbeat settling, the rhythm finding something her body recognized as rest, though the room was loud with compressors and muffled clatter and twenty-some people breathing and shifting on benches. Her skin was cooling unevenly. The forearms first, then the backs of her hands, then slowly the neck and face. The torso held heat longest. It always did.

When she'd first come to Kansas, summers hadn't touched her. Her skin stayed dry while others were soaked through. Her breathing stayed even. She remembered mornings when the air was already hot before light, the particular weight of it against her arms and face as she walked, how her body had moved through that heat the way it moved through anything. Ordinary. Twelve Kansas winters had changed something. The apartment on Spruce Street where January came through the window seals. Months of her body clenching against cold it had never been built for, heating bills she couldn't always cover. She sweated more now, earlier in the shift, the kind of heavy sweat that belonged to someone still learning heat. Her heart took longer to quiet after the floor.

She opened her eyes.

5:48.

A young man she didn't know well was standing by the electrolyte machine, studying the packets through the glass. He'd been on the line maybe six months. He still moved through the plant with the attention of someone learning a building, reading the temperature changes between rooms, figuring out where to stand during breaks so the air hit right. He had a scar across the back of his left hand, old and pale, and he kept that hand in his pocket or curled against his side when he wasn't using it. He chose a packet, tore it, poured it into his water bottle, shook it. The liquid turned pale yellow. He drank half of it standing there.

"Those are bad," Óscar told him.

"I know."

"The orange ones are less bad."

He looked at the machine. "They're out of orange."

Óscar shrugged.

Aung put his phone down and stretched his arms above his head. His shoulders cracked twice. "Naing Oo comes back Monday," he said.

"How's his wife?" Halima asked.

Aung tilted his hand. A gesture that held something between yes and not yet.

"They'll start him on the ramp. Five days."

Naing Oo had been on the line nine years. He knew the work in the angle of his shoulders, in the rhythm his body kept with the chain speed. Two weeks in a Wichita apartment with the air conditioning running, his body forgetting this building's heat, the way it moved through him during a shift. The protocol gave him five days at graduated pace to relearn what his body had spent nine years learning the first time. His muscles would remember before his cooling caught up.

3:22.

Rosaura had gotten peanuts from the machine and was eating them one at a time. Her color was coming back, the blue fading from her fingernails. She watched her own hands as if checking on something she'd left unattended. The knuckles loosening, the small bones of her fingers becoming hers again. Every shift her body crossed the same border twice, cold side to break room to cold side, and each crossing cost something she couldn't name except as time. The minutes it took for her hands to work right. The minutes after that when the break room's warmth turned from relief to just warm and she knew the buzzer was close.

"It's hotter this year," she said.

"Every year is hotter this year," Óscar said.

1:54.

People were standing, snapping aprons, pulling on gloves. The room's brief ecology dissolving. Óscar pressed his hard hat on and the grid marks on his forearm had faded to nothing. The young man finished his electrolyte drink and crushed the bottle with one hand, the scarred hand, without thinking about it. Aung put his phone in his locker and closed it, the sound lost under the Velcro and snaps and benches scraping back.

Rosaura was still sitting, flexing her fingers one last time, pressing each one straight. She looked up.

"You know what I miss," she said. She wasn't looking at anyone in particular. "Waking up cold."

Halima stood. The cinder block had cooled a narrow strip along her shoulders and upper back, a band of lower temperature that would last maybe five minutes on the kill floor before her own heat erased it. She snapped her apron at the neck. The air sealed out.

0:31.

Rosaura stood. She said something about the drive home, or the evening, or the weather waiting outside the building's walls. The compressor on the drink machine cycled on and the words were under it and gone.

The buzzer sounded.

The room emptied.