Oatmeal

Oatmeal

“Well this was a waste of time!” he sighed as he stirred the ice in his empty glass of Coke. He needed something, a poem, a novel, a short story, anything. Not like it would get published, nothing ever did. Still, he was a writer, the factory just paid the bills.

It was his night off, Saturday night. No factory that morning and none the next, Sunday. So he sat in the corner booth with his notebooks to find something. The diner was open twenty-four hours and he was expecting drunk college students any minute now. He couldn’t write about his life, it was too boring to get published. Wake up, go to work, work, come home, write, sleep, eat and take a shower somewhere in there, that was it. It was a flat, bland existence, no one would buy it.

He needed to write about someone else’s life, a life with some meat on it. Someone young and beautiful flitting from bar to bar to find their honey, getting drunk and passing out so they sleep off a hangover through their big exam. Something dramatic with jealous saboteurs and scorned lovers. They’d be coming any minute. Each one of them a car crash just waiting to happen, a tragic death scene for a young protagonist struck down at the peak of their prime. Any minute. The two that had come already had left. Thank God.

Those two failures had been nothing but a disappointment. The blonde was eighteen going on eighty. She was hidden under a mound of clothes that the Salvation Army probably rejected. Two skirts, baggy jeans, a tight tank top that couldn’t contain her unruly rolls of pasty fat flesh. Nothing was clean, not even the air around her, the booze and tobacco lingered wherever she walked like a boiled fart. Her friend was even worse.

He stopped the waitress as she flied by and asked her for another Coke. He could afford a free refill. The old waitress and the men at the other table might have been something. A short story maybe. Once the future bag ladies had left they started talking about all the drunk college students that would be pouring in. Quarter past two, the bars all closed at two in the morning. He could almost taste it, all those gritty little stories oozing across town right into his notebook. The police could taste it too, that herd of D.U.I.s migrating right at them, him and the police, like lemmings toward a cliff.

The waitress had tried to save them, the two hideous drunks that’d left already. All the waitresses tried. She explained to the men at the other table about how they’d always try to offer to call cabs for the drunks, make them wait longer to give them time to sober up, steal their keys when they weren’t looking. He smoothed the hair from his mustache down with a wry smirk as he heard all this, there was a story in these sneaky saints. He could smell it.

The corner booth where he sat was hard to see, tucked away in a dark little cranny in the wall, it allowed him to hear everything, write everything, without being seen by the other tables. He twisted his beard as he pleaded with the words on the page, trying to coax his next meal ticket out of them. The waitress interrupted him and asked “Are you ready to order?”

He picked up the breakfast menu, keeping his notebook clutched tight in his hand. Scanning the prices, he picked the cheapest meal he could find. “Just the oatmeal.”

“Toast or pancakes with that?”

“Pancakes.” They’d be bigger than the toast, he’d milk every penny he could out of it. The waitress had been interrupting him constantly, good service, he’d have to leave a tip. With a cheap meal like that it wouldn’t have to be a dollar, he’d have to see what change was in his pocket when he got up to leave, or her shift might end before he left, that’d solve everything.

He didn’t bother looking up when the waitress returned, just grunted before she fluttered away again after setting his bowl down for him. He didn’t bother looking at the oatmeal either. “Lucky it didn’t come in a coffee cup.” He muttered. He couldn’t help but wonder why was the waitress so damn cheerful though. A graveyard shift full of drunks, junkies, and misfits bossing you around? Who could possibly be happy about that? The oatmeal should have taken longer too, bought him more time, kept the waitress quiet. At least until the drunks came in any minute now.

“Here’s the honey and brown sugar, spoon’s right next to the bowl.” He looked up. The waitress smiled, set down a fresh Coke, and disappeared.

He set down the notebook with a soft groan as he thought about actually having to eat that gray slop. Still, he had to eat, he hadn’t eaten all day, and this was the cheapest way to fill his stomach.

Then he saw the food. It was food. Nothing like the greasy leather the drunks would call steak and the powdered eggs they would gorge themselves on. He’d been there enough times to try everything on that menu, why had he never tried this? Did people even know about this? The bowl of fortitude blossomed steam from it’s place on the table. The bacon the day before was a cheap whore, greasy and thin. The dome shape of last week’s mashed potatoes exposed the tub that they’d been spooned out of with an ice cream scoop out back. Tuesday’s poor potatoes had been drowned in the bubbling fat of an overcooked swine. But this! This was the food that the pilgrims built a new world upon! The rest of the world had a decrepit imitation while the glorious original had hidden itself away in this squalid dive!

He stared at the wallpaper, adjusted his glasses, was there log walls hidden under it? He made a note that if there wasn’t, there should be. The waitress buzzed by, “Excuse me! Miss?” he waved a hand and flagged her down. “Did I really order this?”

“Yes sir. Is there something wrong?”

“No! No! Not at all!” And with that, she was gone, leaving him alone with his thoughts and his oatmeal.

The bowl had to be the size of his head, if not bigger. The brown sugar, melted by the steaming oats, ran down the sides of the small mountain in front of him in mahogany streams. The honey undulated in gold and scarlet waves as the light played upon it like a butterfly slowly opening and closing it’s wings as it drinks from a flower. It settled, the honey and the melted sugar, around the fortitude so that it was like a an island rising from a sea. Raisins, like velvet amethysts, beckoned from within, seducing the adventurous to mine this amber remnant of Eden.

The honey, more than anything else, drew his eye. Something swirled in the bulb of that tiny glass pitcher. Formless, like the future in a crystal ball, a memory? He took the pitcher by the handle and gingerly poured out a dollop on his finger. The misty memory took shape as he stuck his finger in his mouth.

He was in an orchard, the trees were bursting with fragrant pink blossoms, their branches bent almost to breaking by the weight of all those delicate petals. His grandmother held his hand, it was spring, the diner was ten years and hundreds of miles away. Her friend was explaining how their family kept the orchard just for the honey the bees would make from the nectar of the cherry blossoms. The entire family, four generations, would gather for the harvest. Each glass jar would have to be filled one by one.

Then he realized; the drunks were coming! Those horrid little sadists would be there any minute! Pissing and moaning on a moment that was heaven sent with all their self-induced problems! His eyes darted across the room, he was in the corner booth, no one would see! He shoveled this lost sacrament down his gullet, praying thanks and forgiveness for each spoonful.

The waitress returned and set a plate on the table. “Everything okay?” He gave her a thumbs up. He didn’t say a word; talking meant he wasn’t eating. She smiled, set down the syrup, and disappeared.

It was only after the last oat had been picked clean from the bowl that he looked up. At the sight of the syrup he was six and he and his grandma had just gotten a new pair of moccasins each. They were in a little diner, hidden in the shadow of a church. There was cider. The sunset had gotten stuck in the trees, it wouldn’t get free until there was snow. The pancakes waited. A dark, earthy brown enveloped them, was them, was the grains of wheat and hazelnuts that dotted their surface. It soaked into the dark berries inside them, and then, consumed.

He wiped his mouth with a napkin, careful to clean his beard thoroughly before getting the attention of the waitress again. “You need another Coke sir?”

“Yes please, mind if I ask a question?”

“Go right ahead.”

“Where do you get the honey from.”

“Bees.”

They chuckled.

“No, I meant who sells it?”

“It’s just local.” she dismissed with a shrug. “Don’t get many orders for oatmeal and pancakes. Especially at this time of night.” He looked at her as though she had come from another world before she explained. “No meat. That’s all anyone ever wants. More meat.” and with that thought, she left.

He smiled as he took up the notebook again. It was cheap, a dark purple one bound with a thin wire. He took up his pencil and began to underline, erase, began cutting the meat out of everything. There’s no meat in firmament, there’s milk and honey instead. Fruit. The drunks never came. He never noticed. He set his pencil to the bland, flat page and words sprouted like wheat, flowed like honey. He wrote. Wrote his own stories. Made paste of the meat and played with it until his hands were fit for pearl.

The air shimmered silently, and the waitress appeared. She slipped the bill onto the table unnoticed. And then there was another shimmering, and she was gone. His kingdom come, her work here was done.