Magical Realism - Short

This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are fictitious and any similarities to actual persons, locations, or events is coincidental. This work cannot be used to train artificial intelligence programs.  No AI tools were used in the writing of this story.

All rights reserved. Tibbytown Buffet Copyright © Eddie Generous 2026

TIBBYTOWN BUFFET

Plate in hand, face and neck pouring out from the collar of her shirt like dough waves, the woman said, “You need more shrimp, rings too. If you got ‘em.” There was no need to await a response. The woman turned from the buffet with a loaded plate.

“Right away, right away,” Echo said, scurrying back toward the kitchen. The gentle breeze was pleasant. The uniform breathed better if she rushed.

Through the hot dining floor and through the swinging doors into the cooler portion of the kitchen. It was a trade-off, the heat was lesser, but the grease stink was much higher. There was a clamor of clanking dishes and utensils, thirteen teenaged boys and girls staffed the six stainless-steel sinks around the long wash alley. Grates on the floor let the teens spray blast the room clean at the end of every shift. A fan built into the ceiling kept the temperature at a comfortable cool.

Comfortable workers were efficient workers.

At the far end of it all, were a sliding order window and a kitchen buzzer button. Echo bumped one of the washer boys as she hurried to the buzzer. He dropped a dish and shouted in his native tongue. It was difficult to recall where they’d all come from, especially when many did not last long.

The Tibbytown Buffet paid minimum wage and the employee door revolved. Foreigners almost always. The regional manager accepted the brunt of the incoming resumes at immigration offices. Zhou Wen switched continents and became Echo, met the manager of the Metro Vancouver Tibbytown Buffet chain the same hour she arrived in the country a year earlier.

“Sorry, sorry,” she said to the angry boy—tanned skin, dark black hair and eyebrows.

There was no time to feel guilty. Water droplets sprayed as she shrank her arms tight to her body so as to avoid collisions. At the back wall, she pressed the buzzer and the slate window opened. Heat streamed through the gap and Echo jerked her head away.

“Yeah?” asked a man in square wire-rimmed glasses beyond the window.

He spoke with a local accent. Echo learned the difference between Canadian and American accents quickly enough.

“Need bin of rings and bin of shrimps, rings and shrimps,” Echo said.

“Shrimps or shrimp, which is it?” The man began closing the window as he spoke to another white-coated cook in the hidden room. The window swung back open; Echo had already turned around. “Echo!”

Spun on a pivot, she peered through the gap in the steel. The food smelled fresher in there. It was impossible to ignore that some magic must go on behind that wall. The mysterious ingredients of the secret sauce.

“Can you come ‘round back? We need the shipment brought in, but you can’t tell anybody. Dr. Regent skipped out on us and we’re swamped.”

“Right away, right away.”

The idea that all the cooks had doctorates offset any hope that if she stuck around, she might climb the ladder.

“That’s a good girl,” the man said, but as the window closed a feminine voice from behind the window shouted at the man and the window swung back open. “Echo! I apologize for calling you a good girl. It was condescending and sexist.” The window began to close again. “There, you happy?” The window clapped the rest of the way home.

Echo found most Canadians totally odd.

She raced to the dining floor and through the door on the side of the building. A big man from out of town sat with his small wife and their three big daughters at a picnic table. They waved to Echo, probably needing drinks, but she ignored them. If she delayed helping the kitchen, the delay compounded tenfold while dealing with the customers later on.

It was hot outside. Sweat instantly bubbled and dripped from her tight candy orange ponytail. She glanced around the alleyway. Seeing nobody, Echo bent forward and brought the front of her billowy bob dress to wipe her brow. The plastic bracelets clanked on her wrists like gumballs falling from a machine.

At the back of the brick building, next to a steel door with a touchpad lock were the shipment boxes. Rumors abounded about the food at Tibbytown. There were protests by people dressed up in paper bags holding signs. They came and went. They wanted in on the secret. Tibbytown Buffet won a lawsuit that said they didn’t have to share trade secrets and since the health inspectors remained happy, they never had to open their doors to public interests.

Besides, the offerings always tasted fresh and perfect, and nobody ever got food poisoning.

Tibbytown Buffets had begun popping up all over the world. Echo knew this from her Tibbytown employee emails. Bigger than McDonald’s, the manager often promised, Give us a year!

Great taste and great value, Tibbytown Buffet often had a line. Customers waited with smiles, complimenting the staff, and stating that it was cheaper to visit Tibbytown Buffet than the grocery store.

How is that possible?

Echo would smile and shrug her tiny shoulders. She had no answer, only the doctor-cooks knew the secrets.

She knelt by the back door and picked up the first two boxes of the shipment. She kicked at the door, twice.

The back alley was too clean to be behind a restaurant. The dumpsters looked as if they belonged outside an office supply store rather than a buffet.

The door opened and the man with the glasses stepped sideways. He slid a steel ring stopper on an arm to hold the gap.

“Put the boxes over there and hurry. You’re letting the heat in,” he said and then rushed to a small monitor.

There were two other doctor-cooks in the squat room, both wore white coats and stood by monitors attached to humming stainless-steel machines. Fans blew from the ceiling. The machines gave off tremendous heat.

Echo dropped the first two boxes, her curiosity overloading. Suddenly she was facing the restaurant world’s biggest secret.

It was a strange kitchen and the name on the boxes was familiar, she’d seen the symbol once as a schoolgirl while touring the north near the Russian and Mongolian borders.

Yinger Shipin. Protein farms.

They mixed all sorts of things to feed to animals and inmates. According to the government, it was a big help during the droughts. There were rumors that the farms also added deadstock to bulk the nutrient counts. There were rumors that some of that deadstock came from the prisons, but nobody really believed that.

Most people didn’t believe it.

Echo gathered two more boxes from outside. It was impossible to take her eyes from the big machines. After the final box, she lingered, fiddling with the doorstop on the steel arm while she watched the monitors. Mostly numbers, but there were some words.

“If you’re going to stay a minute, close that door,” a frustrated woman said.

“Okay, yes, yes,” Echo said.

“You know she shouldn’t see this,” a man said. He had a long dark face with frizzy grey hair.

Echo thought he looked like a cotton swab.

“She’s cool. She won’t tell, will ya?” the man with glasses said.

Echo shook her head, twice.

“Better not, trade secrets and whatever,” the woman said. “They’d sue you so hard you could serve onion rings for a million years and never pay what you owed.”

Overhead, a tub swished liquid and a rushing downward splash slammed within one of the machines. The frizzy-haired man tapped at his touch screen. A light thump followed the sound of rushing air.

“Cool it. Echo, come over here. You said rings and shrimp, right?” This was the man with the glasses.

“Yes, shrimps and rings, shrimps and rings.”

The man lifted a bar attached to a stainless-steel wall of the machine. It resembled the industrial dish rinsers the washers used, but there weren’t dishes back there, only trays for the food.

“Just watch this, shrimp and rings are both easy, no sauce on them, no extra nutrients.” The man with glasses tapped instructions on the screen and the machine beeped. “Oh yeah.” He walked to the small pile of boxes and peeled one open. From within, he pulled out a square wrapped in translucent blue plastic.

It looked like twigs, or fruit stems.

“See, we put the compacted protein in here.” The man with glasses pointed at the packet and then the machine. He then showed Echo how to load the organic square into the hopper. Unsealing the plastic released the vapor lock and the twigs and stems came alive, though stunted with time. The doctor-cook tapped on the screen three more times. “We use new blocks mostly, but we also make about two protein blocks a night from dishwasher refuse. Do folks like them light or dark?”

Fascinated, Echo answered without thinking, “Crispy, crispy.”

“Darker then.”

The frizzy-haired man said, “That’s what all the ladies say.”

The trio laughed. Echo did not.

Through the window of the machine, the mostly dead crickets, spiders, and mantises gave the last throws against impending demise. The machine had started to buzz and light shot into a stainless-steel buffet pan. Building out from the center, she watched a mountain of onion rings form at the ends of the protein beams.

“And that’s protein printing,” the man with the glasses said. “Now, you’d better go before Wen comes in.”

“You doctors, back to work, and you, what you doing back here, huh? You want me to send you back to China-land?” The woman had lowered her voice to mimic the manager.

The trio laughed again, and Echo backed away, not laughing, her mind aflutter. She opened the door to the brightness and the hotter heat. The collective reality of the situation made her gag. The only place she could afford to eat since moving to Vancouver was Tibbytown Buffet.

Through the slowly closing door to the kitchen, the man in the glasses said, “Hey, when you came over, you picked your name right? Why did you pick the name Echo?”

Echo turned around—the blood mostly departed from her head—and faced the three doctors who printed the food at Tibbytown Buffet. They looked right back at her.

“Immigrations woman give it to me. I don’t know why,” Echo said.

XX