John Wayne

by Rob Walsh

He placed his cup hard onto the saucer, and several people looked up. He said that after a full diner breakfast there was nothing better than to rinse one’s mouth out with a little hot coffee.

“Enigmatically, this cup,” he looked at his, “seemed to be more than empty, seemed to not even be a cup any longer,” and as the waitress began to fill his cup he touched her wrist with one finger. It was not unlike how the waitress tested a handle’s temperature before gripping it fully. “The eggs were as sour and metallic as a lie,” he went on, “but there is as nothing as satiating as a good lie.” She returned to her frying pan. She sprinkled pepper into the pan. He tried to hold back a crack, a playful crack about the shape of the waitress’s body, and he managed to. But her skin had the sheen of poultry that has been left overnight on a counter, and this came tumbling out. “It is rare to feel perfectly at home in one’s juices,” he explained, but clearly she had taken his comment the wrong way. He checked quickly the discoloration and foreign matter on the paper napkin and was now standing in the doorway of the small diner. He had the ability to move this swiftly.

After walking for some while he came upon a shack. Small and plain, he thought, though much garlanded with unnecessary shingles and shutters. It made him think of a child whose parents had smothered it in colorful bandages. Go inside? he thought.

He was the kind of man who asked himself this question several minutes after having gone inside and begun to rifle through the desk drawers and the stack of pictures on the desk.