Short Story Review: “Server” (2020) by Stephan Moran

I don’t recall having that many (consciously) physical reactions to literature…. though upon arriving at the last pages to Andrew Scott Card’s Ender’s Game (1985), I remember being tempted to throw the book across the room.

Since the book was borrowed, I ended up not throwing it (also because it belonged to my supervisor at the time). Later he and I discussed Card’s denouement, and I eventually came to realize it didn’t have (what, as kids, my siblings and I would’ve called) a “trick ending.”

But reading Stephen Moran’s short story “Server” (Moran Press, 2020? [hand-stitched!])—each of the three times that I read it—gave me the heebie-jeebies, a sense of constriction bordering on claustrophobia, the way some people have described how they felt watching Uncut Gems (2019).

My siblings have worked in restaurants over the years, and I try to tip generously except in the most extraordinary of circumstances, so I can somewhat empathize with the server-narrator of the story named Scott. Parts of it certainly reminded me of passages from chapter XIV of Orwell’s memoirish Down and Out in Paris and London (1933):

Between constantly seeing money, and hoping to get it, the waiter comes to identify himself to some extent with his employers. He will take pains to serve a meal in style, because he feels that he is participating in the meal himself.

And:

According to Boris, the same kind of thing went on in all Paris hotels, or at least in all the big, expensive ones. But I imagine that the customers at the Hôtel X were especially easy to swindle, for they were mostly Americans, with a sprinkling of English––no French––and seemed to know nothing whatever about good food. They would stuff themselves with disgusting American ‘cereals’, and eat marmalade at tea, and drink vermouth after dinner, and order a poulet à la reine at a hundred francs and then souse it in Worcester sauce. One customer, from Pittsburg, dined every night in his bedroom on grape-nuts, scrambled eggs and cocoa. Perhaps it hardly matters whether such people are swindled or not.

Stephan Moran’s “Server” offers similar sentiments, but much more intensely. The story is nearly pure intensity. Reading it is like running out of coffee but resorting to sticking your finger in an empty light socket in order to wake yourself up.