The Goat Cheese Brine Shuffle

Randi McAllister, thirty-three years old and covered in goat cheese brine before noon, stood at the workbench and stared down her boyfriend.

Gabe stared back. He was thirty-four, wiry, and had grease on his knuckles from a rail car he'd been rebuilding for three weeks. Between them, on the scarred steel bench, sat the broken hurdy-gurdy. A silk scarf hung out of its wheel like a tongue.

"You're going down," said Randi.

"Babe. You fix cheese. I fix a two-ton monorail car." Gabe gestured at the half-finished module behind him, all gleaming new gears and exposed wiring. "This isn't a fair fight."

"It's exactly a fair fight, because your monorail mod has been 'almost done' for three weeks. You're slow. I'm fast. That's the whole bet."

He opened his mouth. Closed it. She had him there and they both knew it.

The maintenance bay hummed around them. High ceiling, buzzing fluorescents, rows of gutted rail cars waiting for parts. It smelled like grease and ozone, and under all of it, the faint pickle tang from the cooler in the corner where Randi kept her aging wheels of chevre. She'd hauled the hurdy-gurdy and a vat of brine all the way here because she refused to go home before winning.

"So the terms," said Randi. "First one to finish their project wins. Loser wears whatever the winner picks to the Burning of the Cane festival. In public. In front of the whole town."

"Full costume. No veto," said Gabe. "And you know I'll pick the giant cane."

"You'd pick the giant cane."

"I would absolutely pick the giant cane."

She stuck out her hand. He shook it. Then he shook it again, slower, grinning at her.

"Stop that," she said. "You're not distracting me with your hands."

"Worth a try."

They went to their corners. Gabe crouched by his monorail module with a torque wrench and a look of terrible concentration. Randi flipped the hurdy-gurdy on its side and studied the wheel.

The scarf was wound in deep. Some idiot, and the idiot was her neighbor's boyfriend, had cranked the wheel with the scarf still threaded through the strings. Now it was jammed in there like a tick. She got a hem gripped in her fingers and pulled.

The wheel turned half an inch. The scarf pulled back. She yanked harder. Nothing.

"Having trouble over there?" called Gabe, not looking up.

"Nope. This is expert-level scarf extraction. You wouldn't understand."

"Uh huh."

She braced her knee on the bench and gave it everything. The scarf came loose about two inches, and the hurdy-gurdy's crank spun free with a snap, and her elbow hit the shelf behind her, and the shelf held the lid of the brine vat, and the lid was not on the brine vat properly, and physics happened.

Brine went everywhere. Specifically, brine went in a beautiful salty arc across the bay, and about half of it landed on Gabe's monorail module.

Silence.

Gabe turned around very slowly. His module, his beautiful three-week module, was glistening. Pickle juice ran down the new gears in cheerful little rivulets.

"Randi," he said.

"It was an accident."

"You brined my monorail."

"I brined it lightly! It's a light brining! Some of these gears are bronze, brine is basically... good for bronze?"

"It is not good for bronze."

She peered at the module. Okay. It was pretty soaked. Salt water on freshly machined gears was, technically, not the manufacturer's recommendation.

"So this is the situation," she started.

"This is the situation is correct." Gabe stood, wiped his hands on a rag, and looked past her at the compressed air hose coiled on the wall. She saw him look at it. He saw her see him look at it.

"Gabe. Don't."

"It'll be quick."

"It's powder lubricant, that stuff doesn't come out of anything, don't you dare, Gabe, I swear, oh my god, that's MY SIDE OF THE BENCH, you absolute gremlin!"

The hose roared. A cloud of fine white powder billowed over her workspace, over the hurdy-gurdy, over her. She stood in the middle of it with her arms out, wearing it like a snowfall. It got in her hair. It got in her mouth.

She spat. It tasted like a chalk factory with a lemon twist.

"That," she said, brushing powder off her eyebrows with two fingers, "was an act of war."

"That was a counterstrike. The Geneva Convention has rules about brine attacks."

"There's no Geneva Convention for cheese!"

"Then we're in a lawless place, aren't we." He hung the hose back on its hook, way too pleased with himself. Powder dusted his forearms from the blowback and he didn't even notice.

They looked at each other across the wreckage. Her bench was a white disaster zone. His module was a drippy, sad, brine-scented disaster zone. The hurdy-gurdy sat in the middle, somehow the victim of both attacks, scarf now dusted white and brine-spotted.

And then, because it was inevitable, they both started laughing.

"Okay," Gabe said, wheezing a little. "Okay. So we both made it worse."

"Significantly worse."

"You gave yourself an extra job too. You still have to get that scarf out AND the wheel's now got powder in the bushings probably."

"Your gears need a full solvent wipe-down and possibly a re-grease. Powder plus brine is a paste. You've invented monorail paste."

"Great. Collectible."

Randi set down her hem-pullers and surveyed the damage with her hands on her hips. The smart move, the boring responsible move, was to declare a ceasefire and clean up before anything corroded. She hated that it was the smart move.

"Ceasefire," she said. "Truce for cleanup. The bet's still on."

"Obviously the bet's still on. I'm going to win it."

"In your dreams. Once I get that scarf out, this thing plays like new and I'm done by four."

"And I finish the module by four-fifteen and you're a giant cane by Saturday."

They split a rag between them and got to work. She hit the module with solvent first, since brine was the more urgent enemy, and he held the light for her and grumbled every time she touched a gear.

"Lefty loosey," he said.

"I know how gears work, Gabe. I age cheese in rotating wheels. Wheels are my whole life."

"That's the saddest sentence I've ever heard."

"You dated a park ranger for a summer. You don't get to judge my life."

"That ranger was great and you know it." But he was grinning while he said it.

When the worst of the mess was handled, they climbed the little steel stairs to the office loft, which had