Submission (#61) Approved

It was hard, when so often you had experienced work in a community and now you were a lone soul. At least, that’s how Ubeu felt. So when she saw that the Bluebird Café was accepting extra help, the tortoiseshell figured she had nothing to lose. It would be a good way to get her mind off all the strife of mixed opinions and the expedition, along with the constant Boundless threat. Better to be able to help some folks while she could, in ways that didn’t involve so much arguing.

So Ubeu made her way into the café and looked around for the cat named Lyle. It quickly became clear that there was a lot to do, and Ubeu wasn’t sure how much help she would be decorating cupcakes, given it seemed to require quite a lot of paw dexterity. The dishwashing and baking she had a shot at, though, so she volunteered to do both. Beginning with baking was perhaps the wrong idea. Back at home, Ubeu would sometime season her cooked meals or prepare a salad from harvested vegetables, but she had never baked. She’d heard about it, of course, but seeing the oven up close and all the messy ingredients and the flour that got absolutely everywhere was a whole other thing entirely. The tortoiseshell struggled with trying to keep flour dust out of her fur as she kneaded the dough, which she was otherwise very good at. What she wasn’t good at was adding all the ingredients and not overdoing certain items and underdoing others. Multiple times the workers had to correct her on how much butter she was tossing into the bowl, or how many eggs she was adding, and was that an egg shell she’d managed to get into the batter??

With burning ears and shifty eyes, Ubeu excused herself to make herself more useful over by the dishwashing station. She was quick to scrub the flour and dough pieces out from between her toes and caked in her fur. Trying not to let stares get to her, she began to pile empty plates into the sink and attempt to figure out how to work the water. Running a tap was also something she hadn’t ever had to do before, but she had to learn quickly. It turned out paw dexterity was important here too, and the plates often slipped from between her paws and clattered into the soapy water of the sink, splashing her and others working by her side. Ubeu gave mumbled apologies and tried to carry on, but one of the workers stopped her.

“If you’re too rough with those, you’re gonna break the damn plate!” they said, grabbing one from her paws and furiously scrubbing it.
Ubeu found her eyes following their motions, begrudgingly impressed with the finesse with which the cat worked. One paw was able to hold and balance the plate perfectly, while the other simply soaped it up with a sponge. It looked so easy to that cat, but she knew the coordination was something she wasn’t used to. It wasn’t fair! She was perfectly good at climbing trees and hunting and harvesting, but apparently those didn’t require the same manner of paw-work that dishwashing did. That, and her colony tended to use more of a combination of their mouths and their paws, as opposed to doing everything with delicate little claw motions.

Ubeu flexed her toes. She’d get better with practice, of course, but did she really want to? If she started doing all these things, she’d become more like them and feel even more disconnected from the home she’d had to leave behind. For a moment, she was lost in her thoughts, staring blankly ahead, before the worker in front of her snapped her fingers in front of her face and tsked disapprovingly.

“If you’re not gonna work, then why don’t you go somewhere else?” they admonished, motioning to the decorating table.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea…” Ubeu watched as the cats there gingerly held frosting tubes and squeezed the contents in intricate patterns onto the baked goods.

“If you go earlier in the assembly line where they put on the first layer of frosting, it doesn’t matter how messy you are!” chirped a cat from Ubeu’s other side. She had a supportive smile on her face and was giving the harsher worker a disapproving look.

Ubeu considered that for a moment, and then slowly made her way over to the front of the decorating line. Surprisingly, the cats there were delighted to have more help, and they quickly began piling unfrosted cakes in front of her. Ubeu was given a pair of gloves, which felt so weird on her paws, but she soon got over the sensation and began splattering frosting all over the cakes, spreading it, molding it. It was easy, it was fun, and best of all there was no way she could do it wrong!

Ubeu spent another hour like that, finding herself grinning and giggling despite herself, even talking with the other workers like she had grown up in Greendoze, some even telling her stories from their early days working at the café. When their work was done, Ubeu found herself leaving the Bluebird Café with her steps light and her heart aflutter, more at ease than she had been in a while.