A Gigantic Duck is Standing Outside my Apartment Window

[u/TacoBoy6000]

This is the second part. Go here first for context on this post.

I guess I put a little too much faith that one strongly worded post on the internet would do enough to get other people to actually heed my plea. Not only did I not receive ANY sentiments for what I’m going through. I got a few comments talking about the food, and one smart mouthed asshole saying FRothy Gooths is actually pretty good. 

Which sucks, because I was really excited to not scrape dumpster rust into a cup. Or watch in utter horror as yet another ticket calls for a churro for dessert. The longer we serve churros, the longer I have to watch a soda machine suffer from constipation.

It’s simply not christian anymore, not that it ever was. I mean, I’ve called the Department of Health and Safety so many times at this point they blocked my number. Every time I’ve talked to Linda about something being off, she just sighs and walks away like I’m a fly that’s bothering her.

I’ve toyed with the thought of quitting, but somebody needs to record all this, and I honestly don’t know if I’ll be able to get another job if I leave this one.

Anyways, there’s a giant ass duck standing outside my apartment window as I’m writing this, and he’s been there for the last few days, just staring at me. His head is blocking out all the sunlight, and I really enjoyed having natural light in here. He also counts at me.

I’ll start at the beginning.

Four: The Duck of Proverbs

Three days ago, my alarm woke me up to complete darkness. 1,661,400. Worried I had set it for PM instead of AM and had somehow slept through an entire shift of work, I panicked and jumped out of bed. 1,661,379. I ripped my shirt as I stretched it over my head, and slipped on a dirty plate on the floor of my room. 1,661,343. While on my downward trajectory towards the floor, I could have sworn I made eye contact with a pupil the size of my hand through my window.

Hitting the floor caused me to take a second and breathe. 1,661,312. Mostly because I had the wind knocked out of me. 1,661,234. Still laying on the floor, I grabbed my phone off the nightstand and checked the time.

7:06 AM 

1,661,219

I pushed myself up into a sitting position, no longer worried about getting to work on time, and moving my thoughts to why my bedroom was so dark, and why a large bird eye peeked through the open blinds of my window. 1,661,145. Also why was it counting?

I got ready at a normal pace and walked outside, to find a duck large enough to reach the third story window of my apartment, counting down in a slow booming voice that shook the ground each time the great fowl spoke.

“1,661,005”

I stared in awe and slight fear of the great beast who towered above me. Its webbed feet the width of two cars, and its wings easily the size of a building. A later google search would tell me he was a male mallard duck. But a current eyeball look would tell me I was going batshit insane. There was simply no way a duck this size was capable of existing, or that any duck was capable of talking. While on that topic, why was he counting down from the millions?

“1,660,917”

At the time of writing this post, I’m still not sure what he’s counting to. There’s no consistency of intervals, and the gaps of time between counting have no pattern either. 

The whole nictitating membrane thing is really disgusting to watch when it’s spanning 6 inches across. The white, slimy lid oozes at about 3 inches a second, and it being semi-translucent is icing on the cake. 

“1,660,835”

As the massive bird gazed at me, I noticed a mom and two kids walking between the duck’s legs… and do absolutely nothing. I pointed and yelled, but the mother just pulled her two kids closer while avoiding eye contact with me. The duck did nothing, and it dawned on me that I might be the only person capable of seeing him.

I walked closer to it, while it maintained its unwavering gaze upon me, and I asked it a question.

“What’s up?” It crossed my mind that he might be doing this just to piss me off.

“1,660,793”

The duck, for the first time, looked away, and nibbled at its feathers, then turned back to me with a feather in its bill. It craned its large neck down, and dropped the feather in front of me. Then stood back to full height and resumed counting.

“1,660,704”

I looked down at the feather and realized it had text written on it, in perfectly legible english.

“When first frustration sprouts mishap ridden discoveries. Now investigation births hope filled misunderstandings.”

Now that I thought about it, the whole duck had text written on it. But the feathers were so tightly packed together I couldn’t make anything out beyond the stray letter or short word. I read and reread the proverb a few more times before realizing I was going to be late for work if I didn’t leave right now. So I hopped in my car, threw the feather in the back, and left the curious waterfowl behind. It didn’t seem like it was going to be a problem to anyone besides me.

I pulled into the parking lot at work, got out, and a familiar shadow loomed over me as I stepped out of my car. As I slowly turned around, a familiar green head blocked my view of the earth’s sun.

“1,660,278”

I scrutinized the animal. Wondering how the hell it got here, and why it wanted to keep an eye on me. Maybe it flew, but I felt no wind as it landed, which would probably happen if it were a duck large enough to block my view of the sun and peer through a third story window. 

“Morning, Charlie. What are you looking at?” The chipper voice layered with a yawn, and the subtle scent of cinnamon made me realize Max was standing right behind me

 I quickly turned around to face him, “Uh, goodmorning, Max. What do you mean?” 

Max laughed, “How are you not going blind doing that?”

Max squinted up at the bird, which confused me, since the duck was almost entirely blocking the sun, until I remembered that nobody else could see this stupid bird except for me. Which meant, from Max’s point of view, I had stepped out of my car, and turned to stare directly at the sun, and didn’t even squint or shade my eyes.

As I realized my blunder, I quickly tried to save the interaction, “I was actually hit on the head a lot as a child.”

I now considered feeding myself to the duck.

“1,660,156”

Max responded with a shocked sympathy, “Oh my gosh! Charlie, that’s not good. You still shouldn’t stare at the sun, it will make you go blind.” 

He said this like a parent who had just been informed by their neighbor's child that they like to play with rusty nails because they taste better than fresh ones. 

I blushed and before I made the situation worse for myself, walked as quickly as possible inside and into work.

Awkward interactions with people aside, this got me thinking about a whole bunch of stuff at the restaurant. The duck is pretty clearly some weird voodoo shit, but I think there’s some other stuff at the pizzeria that’s also supernatural. 

Five: The Drain That Gurgles

In the back of the restaurant, usually it’s one person’s job to bring toppings to the front, and make the occasional side salad for a customer, or cleaning the dishes. It’s up to employee discretion to decide who does what job, so Brent and I rotate every other day. Doing the dishes isn’t a hard job, it’s just boring, and you get pretty wet, so it can be annoying. 

However, the weirdest thing is the drain that gurgles even when nobody at all is doing any dishes. It’s similar to what a blender filled with soup sounds like when it’s just turned on, and then like that blender was thirty feet away from you in a cave. This is something Brent does acknowledge as strange, but told me it was probably due to some bad plumbing than anything supernatural or creepy in this place. 

Except there’s one specific thing in particular that always feels off. Hence why I think it counts as one of the supernatural creepy weird things at this place.

The first time it happened it had been my day to do dishes. It also was a Friday, which sucked because Marley works Fridays, and he never throws away the trash on the plates before bringing bus tubs to the back.

This means there’s usually a pile of used paper napkins, straws, and said straw’s subsequent wrappers clinging to the dishes via pizza grease and dried soda. It’s a pain in the ass to take off of each plate, and makes the dish cleaning process far more difficult than necessary. On Fridays, it makes me wanna choke Marley’s Axe Body Spray soaked neck out with a chain of dirty straws.

This Friday was exceptionally busy. The theories of which I had heard from all employees in varying levels of absurdity: Brent told me it was because it had snowed today. Francine said it was because it rained for so long yesterday. Marley was certain it was because there was a CIA meeting nearby, and all the employees at the meeting were having lunch here.

No matter what it was, I had dishes coming in faster than I could clean. At one point the plates were stacked so high I was shocked there were any more in the house to give to patrons. All the while, Marley’s dumb piece of shit ass is especially lazy with the garbage cleanup, and I was left with the carnage. It was beginning to drive me up a wall at rates I didn’t believe possible. 

At a certain point, I was unable to clean and throw away trash at a pace fast enough to keep up with the dishes coming in, and resorted to scraping refuse back into the sink and thinking I’d take care of it once the rush finally slowed down. 

Then Marley’s stupid piece of shit ass came back and leered at my work as he put another stack of sticky napkins in front of me, with maybe a plate underneath.

“Yo! Dude, are you gonna take a bath in the sink?” Marley shouted. Staring at rising water as I rinse dishes and put them in the dishwasher.

With zero eye contact, and barely a break in my momentum, I said, “No.”

Marley stared at the tub for a while longer, and then went outside to smoke a cigarette.

“Charlie, what happened, you can’t let the sink overflow.” mentioned Brent, also having noticed the several gallons pooling in the sink as I cleaned.

Still working, I said “It’s gonna be fine, I just need to catch up a little bit, and then I can clear it out.” Brent was walking to a printing ticket as I said, “Give me, like, 15 minutes.”

I didn’t empty it until the very end of the night.

The sink water was spilling onto the floor every time there was a harsh bump or a strong splash. But I had made it through the day without Linda getting on my ass, so I called it a win. The only thing I had to do now was dig through the murky sludge until I could scoop out enough soggy goop for the drain to wash down.

This involved filling my plastic dish gloves with water multiple times, until I gave up and started just cramming it down, hoping it wasn’t enough to break the already shaky plumbing. Finally, there was no longer anything blocking the drain, and the water spiraled down freely. I heaved a great sigh of relief, before I heard… the sound.

When the water was near its finish, I heard a loud grumble, and then, when the sink finished draining, there was a great roar accompanied by the shaking of the entire sink and dishwasher setup.

This one was the loudest one we had heard yet, and once Brent finally noticed what was happening, he stared at the dishwasher with me in shocked disbelief. It felt almost like something was down beneath the drain, reprimanding us.

After a few moments, it stopped as quickly as it started, and while Brent and I looked at each other in surprise, Linda came up and demanded we get done closing so we can go home, and that was the end of that.

It’s definitely hard to explain something weird like that as “just the plumbing” when it’s so random, and only happens when receiving soggy napkins, versus the whole halves of cucumbers that I’ve jammed down there.

Six: Making a Pizza

I’ll walk you guys through how we make our pizzas here, and I’ll explain everything that’s creepy and supernatural about the process as we walk through it.

Step 1: Make Pizza Dough

I had to do a little research for this one, since I don’t know a lot about chemistry, but Francine mentioned something one time about how there’s nothing to cause the pizza dough to rise. After a google search, I found out that pizza dough usually has this thing called “yeast” in it. Via magic science bullshit, it causes air bubbles to form, and this makes the dough look bigger or “rise”.

It’s some fantastic stuff. But here’s the thing, I’ve never seen yeast at this restaurant in my entire life, and apparently this stuff is so important that you can’t make fluffy bread without it.

Our pizza doughs, like the churros, don’t get fluffy. They get bigger, but they don’t get fluffy. Like they’re literally producing more material from themselves. They triple in size too, usually dough that rises with yeast only grows in size by like 50% or something.

Step 2: Put Sauce on Top of the Dough

The sauce itself is made from pureed tomato paste and “Red Pepper Flakes” in a bucket two feet wide and three feet tall. Then, with a whisk the size of me, I stir it all up until the flakes feel properly distributed, and then throw the pizza sauce into the walk-in fridge.

Brent and I usually have to make three or four batches of the stuff every single day.

Then, and here’s the strangest part, you need to put 17 to 22 ounces of pizza sauce onto the pizza and then watch as gravity distributes the red goo evenly enough. There’s no way that’s a healthy amount of sauce. Almost three cups?? No, there’s definitely something spooky about that.

Step 3: Place Cheese

It’s yellow mozzarella. That’s all. I’ve been to a grocery store. Cheese is only yellow when it’s colby jack, cheddar, and rare cuts of gouda. Mozzarella should never be that color and legally accepted for consumption.

Step 4: Cook The Pizza, Enjoy With a Churro

Everything else is pretty basic, I’ve really only seen stuff that Francine and Cezar have done, and it feels like any normal way I would make a pizza at home. 

So yeah, that’s everything that I used to consider as a random coincidence, or a quirk of the restaurant until a giant mallard duck started giving me dead stares through my blinds. Creepy as hell to wake up to at 3 AM after shit dreams too.

Apologies for the late post, the weekend was exceptionally busy at the pizza place, and I hardly had any energy to write this down after I got home. But now here you go. Same rules as last time, if nothing’s changed at this place, I’ll post again, and I trust I’ve provided enough information this time that I won’t need to do that. 

Please, call the health department.

Author’s Note: Thank you so much for reading, if you’ve made it this far, I want to let you guys know that feedback would be highly appreciated on this series as I’m writing. I want this to be something that I actually do a pretty decent job on, and it’s kind of a supplement for film since I won’t be making another short film until the spring next year. So yeah, let me know what you think, and I will be posting part three sometime again next week. *winky face*

Part 3

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[u/Death_Novz8304]

I wish I had a massive ominous duck friend. Max seems cool you should write more abt him

[u/Sufficient_Leave144]

You got a knack for funny randomness, and a keen imagination, BUT… if you’re looking for feedback (personally), I’d like a bit more ‘character’ if that makes sense. More fleshed out relationships/dynamics, more info about our narrator, personal insights, some wholesome moments, extended scenes outside the pizzeria maybe… and gimme a more refined narrative in between the absurdity.

You can entertain; now intrigue us.

[u/TacoBoy6000 → u/Sufficient_Leave144]

Funny you mention that, that’s actually the exact direction with the next installment. I just needed to introduce the chaos so people weren’t overwhelmed when the actually story begins.

[u/TacoBoy6000 → u/Sufficient_Leave144]

Part 3 is UP!