• by Nicholas on 01/28/2010

    "Absolute blasphemy!" the man sitting in the coffee shop proclaimed. A grin forced itself upon a waitress' face as she strode past the "gentleman" who was presently giving a quite vivid description of when he was "her age." She was thirty two years old, and he thirty five. She knew this fact, and it was the ridiculousness of his remark, which suggested that there was some sort of large gap between their ages, that forced the smile to appear. She had butter on her fingers from when she had buttered the man's toast last week. She never bothered to wash things off if they didn't particularly bother her.

    As the man continued spewing profanity and/or derrogatory terms toward her female nature, akin to what some kind of profanity fountain might do, if such a thing existed, her smile got larger. She had known this man to act this way since she had first become a waitress at this coffee shop, nearly twenty six years ago. The profanity got louder, and she rolled her eyes and strode over to the man to take his order. He ordered toast, as he always did, and she made it herself. The butterknife slipped out of her hands and landed on the floor. She grabbed another from the back, and felt like throwing it at the man who had desecrated her workplace with his verbage for over twenty years. But she changed her mind at the last moment, because she knew she would need something sharper to do the job right. She sighed heavily as she passed the fourteen perfectly honed Japanese cutting knives on the magnetic strip on the wall.

    She wound her way past the jungle of people and tables in which she worked, up to the man who detested all things female for no reason whatsoever, and placed his toast in front of his wrinkled eyes. He peered around his newspaper, and around her, to the other side of the room. A fly skittered about on the far wall. The man raised his eyebrows, and the waitress prepared herself for the imminent onslaught that was about to spew from his jaw, accompanied by liters of saliva, all targeting her face. She prayed for an umbrella.

    "This filthy, wretched pigsty isn't even suitable for the disgusting, putrid employees that work here! Look! Flies have taken over the entire building, and nobody even cares! When I was your age..." At this point, the waitress was buttering the man's toast, and proceeded to ignore him. Some spit landed on her apron. She let him continue until he ran out of breath. He pushed his toast onto the floor, and stomped on it. The waitress rolled up a sleeve, put one hand on the man's chest, and slapped him in the face. She slapped the man as no other man proceeding him had ever even nightmared about being slapped. His jaw was dislocated, and he was rushed to the hospital.

    The man still returned to the coffee shop each day, but he had been injured so badly that he could no longer speak. Seven years later, his first grandchild was born. There was a strikingly hand shaped birthmark across the boy's jaw.