Habits

    "I don't care what it says on the label, just as long as it tastes right." The one at the bar showed a carious mouth to his victim. He had learned to look away when he smiled, because as surely as he did the smile would drop from his victim's face. His mouth was a charnel house, a morbid burial ground for health. One day he would win the lottery, and he would have all of them replaced. He stretched his lips back over his teeth and looked into the mirror that flowed across the wall behind the shelves of dusty liquor bottles. His extroversion suffered and he blew into his coffee.


      They were talking about her. People tended to mistake her distraction for inattention, and there was something in her look that told people she wasn't listening. It was true that she had retreated within herself, but this only broadened her capacity to observe. There was something about being withdrawn from her environment that helped her to see it, as a deep sea explorer could better observe the depths of the ocean from the inside of a submarine. It was a matter of being safe in reclusion because she wasn't emotionally involved in her surroundings, spending her day in a dry monologue of the aquarium around her. In this way she reflected on the fish that passed through her scope, and the sharks that pursued the fish, without having to defend herself from them. It was about eight in the morning.


      Most of the people from the little town were sharks. She could smell the town all over them, because there was something about the place that bred recondite people. Amongst themselves they would speak disparagingly of the citygoers, but as individuals they would assess and latch on to the polished glow of these foreigners, feeding on the charitable smiles and conversations that they provided. They were grown urchins, having been caught unprepared by adulthood and every subsequent phase of their lives. In the corner booth was the one with the thick glasses, the kind that weren't made anymore. He would stare into the parking lot with his arms folded in front of him, his plate pushed to the far side of the table, and wait until she had tentatively placed her hand under it and lifted it to tell her that he wasn't finished. He did this almost every time he came, because it gave him a reason to speak to her besides placing his order. She knew this and continued to reach for his plates. When she had turned her back on him, he would draw a weathered pouch of chewing tobacco from his shirt pocket and unfold it, crease by crease. He collected disability insurance from levering a drill press down into his wrist.


    She poured coffee for the one who would never look her in the eye, the attenuated girl whose pale eyes were always rested on her chest when she took her order. The girl would fold her slender legs underneath her and scratch the pages of a journal, which she clapped shut whenever she was approached. She had attended her senior prom alone and had stood in the corner, anxiously showing her braces and watching people walk past her.


    At eight fifteen the waitress took her first break of the day. She pulled the smoke into her chest and continued to pull until it filled her throat and nasal cavity, then she held it until she needed to breathe again.


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