“I’ll take two,” I told the young waitress behind the counter wearing a pale blue dress and filthy grease-stained apron. Her blond hair was pulled back tightly into a bun that looked like a small abandoned barrel of hay. In a hurried motion she swept her untrimmed bangs behind her right ear. As her fingernails, painted black, came back to her side I noticed she wore no earrings. There were two sets of holes but no earrings to dangle from or loop through them.
“Anything else,” she asked.
I stared at her and imagined that she was wearing strands of diamonds from each of the holes in her ears — that the diamonds radiated a bright white light that washed over the painful blue fluorescence. When I looked through my imagination, though, I saw that her eyes smoldered — perhaps with impatience — in the pits of her face and her ears were still unadorned.
“No. Thank you.”
Written from 12:05 am to 12:26 am on Monday, December 15, 2008 in my apartment in Concord, NH.