Post #5

Untitled
Sarah Van Name

An unusually warm December has led to this moment in the back of the restaurant, your pantyhose peeled off and sitting beside you on the step. You keep your cigarette to yourself but I like the bitterness of the secondhand smoke blending with the promise of deeper chill in the air. The cars in the parking lot click open, rev up, leave. Neon light-up and off. “I hate this place,” you say through gritted teeth as you slide the lipstick across your mouth. You get up and walk back in.

I feel like I have just missed the best parts of you, as if we are playing hide and seek and they’re just ducking ‘round the corner. You would fit well in a silent movie set in the old West, washing clothes in a river and hanging them out to dry. Your cheeks would get that flush back, visible even through the black and white.

You can do better than packaged sandwiches and fluorescent lights. This is every Dr. Seuss encouragement, every graduation greeting card, every guidance counselor aphorism backed by the real desperation that floods my bones every time I see your eyes these days. Get out. Leave now.

Untitled
Kimberly Wang

Yellow fingertips, I smoke to cover the smell of fried chicken. I watch men grow, triple; the thick ripples of skin and adipose tissue stretching over our cheap metal seats. Talk about going forth and multiplying, huh. Two seats over and I can still feel the lust of body heat through this cheap cotton outfit. Sundays, after church, the children come. I have been here since midnight and, no, Stacy did not come in as scheduled, and, no, your child does not look like an angel in her ratty-ass dress with the ketchup stains and food smears over the skirt. You holler at me one more time to "hurry up with that mayonnaise, miss" and I will spit into your All-American Breakfast plate. This is not your mother's kitchen. But go ahead. Lick your fingers, lick them up. Pigs at a trough, I am but a passive murderer with burned fingers and warm lips, my red lipstick the kiss of death. So tell me, what better things are there to do on my breaks but to smoke, to cover the smell of oil-slick decay.