The Young and the New
The Young and the New
The Experiment Must Proceed
Tuesday, January 1, 2019
Another Time
The restaurant is crowded on New Year’s Day afternoon.
The waitresses are busy, the cooks are frantic, the food is delicious and the sky is gray and the day gets colder and colder but adds no snow to the thin layer that had fallen in the very early hours of the New Year.
They’re playing hockey on one TV, football on the other.
Later in the afternoon, as darkness falls, one of the waitresses who had the day off is at 7-11 buying a diet Coke and cigarettes and he can’t decide if she’s 40 or 50 but he knows he’s happy to see her.
She tells him it was her day off because the night before “they” (Boyfriend? Husband? Girlfriend? Daughter?) had seen Naked Raygun and Masked Intruder and she said it was weird to “see them sober” because they’ve quit drinking.
You were sober? Or they were?
She laughs and says she was sober and you wonder if she’s a drunk and you wonder why she smokes and you can’t see who she’s getting in the car with and you hope this New Year is the best 365 days of days after that she’s ever had.
It’s cold in the New Year. You can feel it the smoky breath she left behind. --TK
Tuesday, January 1, 2019