Fulfillment Center - Part I
In “Fulfillment Center,” Amber struggles to find purpose and a trajectory as she navigates complicated family dynamics, money troubles, and the pull of a seemingly inescapable town. When an Amazon Warehouse opens in her town, she sees a temporary haven: she can work nights to earn a living, while using days to take care of her dying father. But as Amber settles into this new routine, she struggles to learn what she really wants, who she wants to be, and where that life will leave her.
Ariel Chu’s compelling narrative leads readers through one woman’s trying season to unravel her own desires from the needs of others, and determine the path she ultimately wants for herself.
-Emily
They finished the Amazon Warehouse two years after I graduated. At the time, I was working shifts at the 19-Hour Fitness, where I kept bumping into guys I’d dated in high school. Seeing my exes wasn’t that big of a deal, but it still took up too much space in my life. Time to get a new life, Alexis would’ve said.
I still had a group chat with Mandy, Alexis, and Stephanie, and I sent them secret photos of my exes on the StairMaster. They all agreed it was a bad situation. But what did my friends care? They weren’t even living in Eastwood anymore.
This was also the year Dad’s heart got worse. The doctors recommended inpatient hospice care, but Dad wanted to be at home. He spent all day lounging in the living room, glued to his laptop, wheezing his way to the bathroom every so often. He kept sharing long Bible verses on Facebook, and my high school friends kept Liking them.
After a few weeks of this situation, Mom decided to splurge on a part-time nurse. When I wasn’t helping Ms. Cindy out with Dad, or swiping soccer moms into 19-Hour Fitness, I was taking online nursing courses—Mom wanted me to have some kind of career training. The credits would transfer to any CalState, and when Dad died, I’d be able to do college full-time. The only problem was, I kept failing the modules. I just couldn’t study. I split my waking hours between work and home, shuttling back and forth in Dad’s beat-up Toyota. When I finished my shifts, I could barely keep my eyes open long enough to read about fibulas.
So when Amazon started hiring seasonal workers, I thought sure, why not. Flexible hours. I could stay home with Dad and do my online courses during the afternoon. At night, I’d put on a hi-vis vest and pack boxes. The warehouse paid more than anyone else for late shifts; Mom would be grateful for the extra income. I pictured the two of us sharing dinner before she went to sleep and I went to work, heads bent over unpaid bills. The last two waking members of our home.
*****
They built the warehouse where the last dairy farms used to be. Twelve years ago, when our family moved to Eastwood, the whole city stank of cow. Driving to school, you could see rows of them—pressed tight against the feeding rails, ears tagged in bright yellow. After winter rains, the stench of manure steamed up from the dirt, and everyone who visited us complained.
You get used to it, we’d say, pretending not to be affected. It still stinks every year, even though the cows are gone.
As children, we watched construction vehicles clear the farmland and pave it over. We got Vons, Starbucks, Edwards Cinema. Then the hip businesses rolled in: Yogurtland, Blaze Pizza, Acai Bowl. A Borders opened and closed, then became Ulta Beauty. Then we were teenagers, and there was nothing to do. Either you smoked with your friends in the park, or you went to the movies, or you got your older brother to drive you two hours to the beach. Nobody wanted to be in Eastwood; we all just lived here.
A Top 10 Place to Raise Your Family, the bulletins read. All the schools were built in a straight line, so you could drop your kid sister off at third grade and walk down the street to first period English. All the streets were in wide, perfectly planned grids. The whole city was roads, houses, and generic businesses boasting the same drought-resistant shrubbery.
Only a few dairy farms managed to stay put. After a long battle with city development, the owners disappeared. We Eastwood people didn’t see any of that. All we knew was that the drive from school to home was changing—more demolitions, tractors, traffic.
Earlier this year, they put up a new construction fence. They decorated it with computer-generated pictures of a new shopping plaza. COMING SOON! the signs read. IN-N-OUT BURGER, DENNY’S, COSTCO, AMAZON. Everyone was thrilled about the In-N-Out. Dad said he’d try to stay alive long enough to have the pizza from Costco.
*****
At the Amazon interview, they asked me to mark all the times I was available during the week. I’d been working at 19-Hour Fitness so long that I didn’t know how to negotiate. I said I was free every weeknight from 8:30 PM to 5:30 AM, and even volunteered myself for Saturday mornings if there was high demand. Samantha, the interviewer, clicked her pen three times as she nodded over my application. “A self-starter,” she kept repeating. “We need more self-starters in Eastwood, that’s for sure.”
The night before, I’d emailed my resume to Alexis to proofread. She was at San Francisco State studying Communications, so she seemed like she’d be a good editor. My resume came back slashed in red lines. Alexis had added so many notes that all the comment boxes were stacked together. I could only make out a few phrases: “Consider talking about futur...” “Sound PROUDER of yourse…” “List all the nursing modu….”
I clicked “Accept All Changes,” just to get rid of all the red lines. Then I went through the comments one by one. The first one was for the Education section, where I’d written Susan B. Anthony High School, Class of 2013, GPA 3.4. Alexis had highlighted the section and commented: “Don’t forget to talk about Class Speaker!!”
Nope, I thought, and deleted the comment. I’d only been Class Speaker because the guy I was dating, Angelo, had nominated me as a joke. He got all his friends on the baseball team to vote, then told his ex-girlfriend, the student council treasurer, to say my name on the school news. I don’t know how I won. Apparently I was the most “inspiring” and “serious” of all the candidates, though I didn’t know our student body cared about those things.
I don’t even remember the speech I gave. All I know was that I had to go after Helena Chou’s valedictorian address, which was hard enough. After the First Gen Scholars got their awards, I went up and said a few words about how high school was ending, and how college was coming soon, and how proud I was of all eight hundred of us. Angelo and I had broken up by then. The next time I saw him was in the kitchen behind the Arby’s drive-thru window, shouting orders at other workers while I hid my face.
*****
The first night, I was assigned to the packing station. My job was simple: scan items, build a box with tape, put the items in the box, seal the box.
The other worker at my station was named Charlie. He wore too-big glasses and looked like he was still in high school. “You know they don’t hire seventeen-year-olds,” I told him. Somehow I knew he wouldn’t be offended, and he wasn’t.
“You know, they probably do,” he said, shrugging. Then he squinted at the receipt in his hands. “Oh, great. Another dildo.”
“That’s all I’m getting too,” I snorted. “Sex toys and used books. And exercise gear.”
“Shit,” Charlie said. The word sounded so innocent coming from his mouth. “Do people really put these things, like, in their bodies?”
“Sex is fun, Charlie. You should try it sometime.”
He scoffed and flipped a box shut. I grinned and followed suit. The situation really was kind of ridiculous. Then again, it was either this or seeing my exes at 19-Hour.
To pass the time, I tried to figure out who Charlie was in the grand scheme of Eastwood. To end up here, you must have family in the area, or at least some kind of preexisting connection. Nobody came here just to look for jobs. Maybe he was the younger brother of one of my high school classmates. At the very least, we had one thing in common: we were both stuck in this place, and working at Amazon was our temporary answer. You never knew how these things turned out. Maybe we’d be in middle management one day.
*****
I got home at 6 AM, made breakfast. Ms. Cindy wasn’t there yet, but Dad was awake, slouched over his laptop in the living room.
“How was it, huh?” he said. “Do your feet hurt?”
They did—ached miserably, actually—but I shook my head. “I’m making eggs. Want any?”
“No, too much cholesterol. Ms. Cindy won’t like that.”
“She won’t be here until eight.”
“Okay,” he sighed. “One bite. Your Daddy’s dying anyway.”
This was just how it was. The way we talked about death in this house. The same way we shrugged when Uncle Maurice and Auntie Angela got divorced, or when Mom screamed at Dani so bad she moved out and never came back. Shit happens, was the moral of the story. You either spent your time moping or moving on. Mom never showed any weakness. She and Dad still got into dumb fights, and just like before, she just kept yelling until she won.
I filled a plate with reheated white rice, layering some scrambled eggs on top. I was buzzing, strangely alive, so tired that I was floating one inch above my skin. I hadn’t felt like this in a long time. Not since pulling all-nighters for an eleventh grade History Day project or staying up during a girls’ sleepover.
“Thank you, angel,” Dad said when I offered him the plate. His hands trembled too much to take it, so I sat next to him, put the plate on my lap, and fed him a bite of limp egg. I averted my eyes as he struggled to chew.
“So do you like the job?” he said, not without effort. Some saliva was dribbling down the side of his face, and I rose to get a napkin.
“It’s fine,” I said when I returned to dab at his face. “The pay isn’t great, but you know. The people are friendly.”
“Don’t work so hard,” he groaned, propping his feet up. I decided against feeding him the rest of the plate, forking some rice into my own mouth. Then we began one of our long silences, where one of us would have to figure out how to talk to the other. Dad had slowly stopped being Dad over the last four years, and I’d gotten used to treating him as a mannequin: changing his clothes, throwing blankets over his body, escorting him to the bathroom.
I finished half the plate before Dad began to nod off. Relief washed over me. I stood up quietly, putting my leftovers in the fridge. Mom had work in an hour; she’d appreciate that I made breakfast.
In bed, I couldn’t sleep. The morning light was too unnatural. I considered starting one of my nursing modules, but opened Facebook instead: no new messages from Alexis. None from our other friends. Still, I found myself scrolling through their photos, reading all the comments that strangers had left. It took two more hours for my body to shut down.
To be continued…
Ariel Chu is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Southern California. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University, where she was awarded the Shirley Jackson Prize in Fiction. Ariel has been published by The Rumpus, Black Warrior Review, and The Common, among others. Her works have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net Award, and Best Short Fictions Anthology, and she has received support from the Steinbeck Fellowship, the Luce Scholars Program, and the P.D. Soros Fellowship for New Americans.
Check out more of her work here.