He slaughters his hamburger steak with a fork and a butter knife, massacres ringlets of onions again and again thumps catsup all over the bloody commingling, then ever so slowly peppers and salts and reminds me of Hrebic, whose wife, back on the block of my youth, sat all summer out on her stoop, knees awry, one eye black, the other turning gray, sunning the great white hydrants of her phlebitic legs.

Every day the same people at the same table at the rear of the cafeteria. The maiden, 35 at least, is gray at the temples, sour at the mouth. The widow, 55, waves a cigarette like a wand. Girdled and dyed, she needs no one now; She ministers to a dog and has a new apartment. The accountant, 65, wants to retire, his years of intemperance tempered by a stroke, his anger at everything suddenly gone. The janitor, 60, explains over and over how over the weekend he snipped from his garden husks of dead sunflowers and drove them out of the city and into the forest and there in a clearing spread the black cakes for chipmunks to strip, black seed by black seed. I, a young editor, “with your whole life in front of you,” they insist, sit through it all, Monday through Friday, spooning broth, buttering slices of rye, and praying that after pudding again for dessert, the phone on my desk will explode too late with a call I’ll take anyway, and that after that call, I’ll rise and take from my sport coat a speech I wrote years ago, a speech I’ll discard for two lines off the cuff: “Here’s two weeks’ notice. I have found a new job.”

Issue 2, Summer 2010  |  →  |  p. 1