Archive
05/08/09 - (1)
Lights Out
It wasn't that your favorite on-the-way-to-work place for breakfast — Fat Eddie's Eat Stop — Had failed to pay last month's electric bill; it hadn't.
When you and the nine other regulars Entered, at 6:30, and Devora unlocked the door, You all knew, instantaneously, that something was awry,
Since, every morning — rain, snow, shine, swine flu, tsunami — Lafronz, the joint's faithful-hound short-order specialist, Was always the first face (albeit black) to greet you.
Once inside, the problem was obvious as skunk anal-scent-gland odor. Booths, tables, chairs, floor, ceiling were cast in shadows. The only lit fixture, in evidence, was the EXIT sign,
And it was diminished to a seizure-inducing red flickering, Which grew more migraining, the longer you sat in the dark. Reading the paper was more impossible than impractical.
If there were any consolation, It would be that you wouldn't have to see the glistening grease Enveloping your mound of hash browns, six sausage links,
The greenish-blue oil slick shimmering on the surface of your java, The sparkle of your butter-slathered rye toast, The specks in your five-egg omelet (bird beginnings, not red peppers).
But what befuddled you, flummoxed the nine others, you felt certain (In ten years, none of you was on speaking terms, But you could read each other's blank-faced minds),
Was the fact that, apparently, only Lafronz, and Lafronz only, Had any idea how to turn the lights on, Where the switches were located...which gave you pause.
If you can't even make the lights work, turn them on, you mused, What else could possibly go wrong — Jimson weed in the whole-grain flour for the Healthy Choice Pancakes?
Toadstools for the mushrooms? Maggots in the diced spuds? Pulverized rat tails, feet, and whiskers in the Country Smoked Sausages? Salmonella and HIV crawling all over the unwashed plates?
Lice in the salt shakers? Mold in the pepper mills? Toilet-overflow festering in the water pitchers? Freaked, you stampeded for the door, thrice stumbled on table legs,
Muttering words of incoherent wisdom, over your shoulder, Vowing that if, ever again, Lafronz failed to open the 6:30 door, You'd do an abrupt one-eighty, without thinking twice.
All day, you mulled over Lafronz's not showing his face, Ignorant that, the night before, it'd been lights out, for him — A fast-acting case of food poisoning, at Fat Eddie's Eat Stop.
05/08/09 - (1)
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