But Only For A Limited Time
The McRib Is Back
Admiral Biscuit
The McRib is back. Commercials proclaim it and throughout the land people rejoice. Restaurant freezers are stocked, employees are trained—Steve Easterbrook wants to ensure that this will not be a repeat of the Szechuan Sauce fiasco.
The McRib is back. Commercials are aired on radio and on TV, commercials are aired on YouTube and even the McDonald’s app proclaims the arrival of the McRib, returning to participating locations in October.
The internet explodes in anticipation. The McRib is back! A sandwich once removed from the menu due to poor sales suddenly becomes desirable when it can’t be had except for a limited time. Such is marketing.
Television channels facing slow news days shoot a bit of B-reel for the nightly news: there are a few locations where there’s a queue, and in such a queue it’s always possible to find some salt-of-the-earth man who’s driven hours to get his calloused hands on a McRib.
Ideally he’s from someplace in Ohio, maybe Fostoria, because that sounds like the kind of place that might be real and might not be. A place where there aren’t McDonald’s, or if there are, they don’t sell McRibs.
•••••
This isn’t a story about him, although perhaps one day I will tell you that story.
•••••
The McRib is back, and bells ring throughout the land in celebration. Even in the town of Alliance, Nebraska, those echoes are heard over the clanking of coal cars bound from the Powder River Basin.
Railroaders line up at the counter, easily spotted with their high-viz vests and their radios squawking away. The stink of diesel and coal and steel clings to their clothes . . . the bituminous must flow.
Tourists are also in line, maintaining a distance from the railroaders that grime probably can’t cross, for they’re there to visit Carhenge, or they were passing through on US-385 or Nebraska 2 and the McDonald’s is of course conveniently located near the confluence. Right next to a K-Mart, which is surprisingly still in business.
Tourists don’t come to see the K-Mart.
•••••
For Roxann Elkhorn, the shifts all blur together. There are the customers she likes, the ones she doesn’t, the tourists she’ll never see again in her life, and a few locals who stop by sporadically when they just don’t feel like cooking or spent too long at a shift or ferrying the kids to extracurricular activities. Saturday mornings, a group of old-timers—farmers and retired farmers and honorary farmers who worked on the railroad—gather together for breakfast.
The McRib is back and she isn’t sure what all the hype is; it’s honestly not all that great, but who is she to question a customer’s taste? It’s only one more button she’s got to know on the cash register, and it didn’t take her more than an hour of a lunch shift to have its location seared into her brain.
One day it will be gone, and if she has her way, she won’t be working at McDonald’s when the McRib comes back. She’s taking welding classes at WNCC and already has an application in with BNSF.
•••••
Things calm down after the lunch rush.
The railroaders work all hours, of course, and their lunch is when it is.
Some of them might even be eating McRibs for breakfast, which is a travesty when McDonald’s has an all-day breakfast menu. She doesn’t think about that too much.
The familiar faces have mostly gone, with an occasional semi-regular appearing, breaking up the monotony of the lull time, the post-lunch and pre-high school adjournment time.
As with all McDonald’s employees, she’s pushed into a second role during the downtime, cleaning and stocking, but always staying in close proximity of the front counter, ready for the next customer.
She didn’t hear the door open; there wasn’t a bell or a little chirpy alarm to indicate the arrival of a customer, but there was a clicking that sounded like high heels on tile, although the rhythm was wrong.
Roxann, if she’d thought about it at all, would have assumed that it was two women in heels, or possibly tap shoes—if she’d known what tap shoes were.
Of course, it wasn’t; this isn’t that kind of story. It was a pegasus pony, none other than Clear Skies.
•••••
Roxann put down her cleaning rag and immediately began to return to her post at the front counter, faltering as she observed a lavender pony making its way from the door to the counter. Its wings fluffed and then rested against its barrel, and for a moment its attention was focused on the giant cell-phone-looking ordering screen, the McDonald’s app for people who didn’t want the McDonald’s app. The only things that ever came from that screen were confused old people trying and failing to order, and teenagers trying to prank the kitchen by making weird custom orders.
The appearance of an employee at the register got the pony’s attention, and it altered its course, just slightly, to intercept. For a moment, it almost disappeared from view, and then a pair of hooves hooked on the edge of the counter and a head popped up, much like the periscope on a submarine.
“One McRib sandwich, please.”
“Just the sandwich?”
The pony nodded.
“That’s gonna be $3.89,” Roxann said. “Or you can get two for $6.00—$6.33 with tax.”
The pony considered that, tapping a hoof on the counter as it did the mental math. Finally, it nodded. “That’s a good deal, two please.”
“Here or to go?”
“Go.”
“Your total is $6.33.” Roxann knew that even before pushing the buttons on the cash register; plenty of people were taking advantage of two McRibs for only six dollars. After all, the McRib was back, but for a limited time only.
The pony reached back somewhere and produced a wrinkled ten dollar bill.
“Your change is $3.67.” Roxann handed over the money; the pony took the bills and dropped the change into the Ronald McDonald charity box, one coin at a time, sliding them off the counter, taking them delicately in its lips, and depositing them in the box.
There was a moment where conversation could have happened, and if Roxann were more personable, she might have tried. “What brings you to Alliance?” would have been a good conversation starter. Better than “I’ve never seen a pastel pony before in my life and I’m still trying to process if this is really happening or if I’ve breathed too much fry grease and am hallucinating this whole thing.”
She didn’t say anything, just watched as the pony’s ears shifted around, focusing on the noises of the kitchen or a truck on Route 385 using his Jake Brake.
The order finally came up, and Roxann instinctively checked in the bag to make sure it was right before handing it over the counter. “Enjoy your McRibs,” she said as the pony took the bag in its mouth and turned to walk back outside.
For her part, once the outside doors had swung shut, Roxann went back to cleaning around the coffee machine and dreaming about welding on locomotives.
The McRib was back.
Clear Skies was going to have one. She’d missed them the last time they’d come around, being all busy with changing the seasons and whatnot.
She’d come along US Route 235, as tourists often did, and just before she got to the giant white water tower, she angled to the right, having already spotted the golden arches.
She circled the restaurant once, observing the layout of the roads and the parking lot and other obstructions, ultimately deciding to come over the field as she descended, then hook in an airspeed dropping side-slip over the drive-thru island, which should land her near the main entrance with low enough speed to react if somebody walked out of the main entrance unexpectedly.
Her landing plan went off without a hitch, although she came close to a lifted Dodge Ram moseying up to the order speaker. The driver of said truck only got a brief glimpse of her shadow as she crossed over, and he didn’t look left even though he could have easily done so.
The front doors were frustrating; they had a sign that said Pull and a handle which wasn’t hoof-friendly at all, but she figured it out, and once it was cracked just a bit, she could get another leg in the gap and slide it open like that.
It took her a moment in the little vestibule to figure out where to go next. Luckily, Hayburgers had a similar inside layout.
Roxann was the first human she’d ever seen up close, and she tried to look beyond the small eyes and beak-like nose and her bleach-y smell. Clear Skies knew full well that she wasn’t the cook, she was just the interface, the intermediate step between her and a McRib.
She’d expected to just ask for a McRib and get one; she had already figured out that she could exchange the paper bill that said $5 for one, and on her way to the counter, she’d also spotted a convenient little bank for the extra coins she was sure to receive and didn’t want.
“That’s gonna be $3.89,” Roxann said. “Or you can get two for $6.00—$6.33 with tax.”
Clear Skies considered that. Two was better than one, and that sounded like a better deal, although figuring out how decimal currency worked gave her headaches. Almost as bad as when she was in school studying historical pegasus mathematics and had to figure out base four . . . those were primitive times indeed.
Finally, she nodded. “That’s a good deal, two please.”
“Here or to go?”
That was something she’d already decided. While in part, the full experience would include dining in, would include receiving her sandwich boxes on a slippery brown plastic tray, food tasted better when eaten on a cloud. That was an actual fact, and none of her ground-bound friends could convince her otherwise. Chairs and benches and stools and cushions always had uncomfortable pressure points, while clouds didn’t.
Plus, as a bonus, ants couldn't get to her food on a cloud.
“Go.”
“Your total is $6.33.”
She reached back into her purse and lipped out a ten—ten was twice as big as five, so should easily cover two McRibs.
And it did. “Your change is $3.67.” Roxann handed her three bills and a pile of useless base metal discs, which she put one at a time into the repository.
She thought about making smalltalk, maybe asking if Roxann had learned the secret of preparing the McRib, or what life was like in a small-town franchised diner, or if she felt shackled to the earth when she really wanted to be skybound, but instead she just waited patiently for her sandwiches to arrive.
They came in an unbleached brown bag, with the top already folded over in the illusion that that would hold in heat. Roxann forgot to tell her that the napkins were in the bottom, but that was okay; she’d seen them get put in so she knew they were there.
“Enjoy your McRibs,” Roxann said as Cloudy Skies gripped the bag in her teeth. It would have been polite to reply, but she didn’t. The scent of the mythical McRib was in her nose and she wanted nothing more than to eat them in peace; in fact, she was already considering if it would be appropriate to just land on the roof and nom one down, or maybe land in a tree. There were a couple of trees around the parking lot, and they were kind of short and stunted but ants probably rarely scuttled to the upper branches.
In the end, though, she settled on her original intention, flying up as soon as she’d cleared the overhang of the McRoof. Features on the ground shrank and blurred, until the omnipresent cars were . . . well, they were about ant-sized.
She knocked down a little nest in the cloud—comfort came first—and then unfolded the top of the bag and admired the bounty within.
Her hooves weren’t all that great at reaching down into a paper sack and it was undignified to stuff her muzzle in and snack out of it like it was a feedbag, so she tore the top off the bag until she had enough room to pull the first sandwich box out. A little bit of barbecue sauce had spilled around the edge, giving her the first tantalizing taste of the mythical McRib.
She could wait no longer; she folded the lid back and briefly examined the sandwich in all its glory, the hoagie bun with little seeds across the top for texture, the glistening sheen of sauce, pickles and onions, the fake rib-shape of the processed meat, even a vague hint of rosemary.
It was glorious, a sandwich fit for a Princess, a blending of succulent flavors that no pony food could quite match.
Down on the surface, a BNSF freight hauling coal slowly creeps across the landscape, bound for Alliance and perhaps the crew is thinking of taking the short run to McDonalds after they tie down their train for the night, or perhaps they are not. Whatever the case, they won’t be served by Roxann; she got off-shift just before the dinner rush, and is currently on her way to Scottsbluff and her welding class.
Far above, unseen by either, nested in a cumulus cloud, Clear Skies wipes the last of the sauce off her muzzle. A few stray onions are in one of the sandwich boxes—she doesn’t particularly like onions.
Two sandwiches were just the right amount. Her belly’s full, and she’s perfectly contented in her temporary cloud-nest, slowly drifting over Nebraska.
The McRib is back.
But only for a limited time.