Ed sat on a stool in the diner.
It was only a little ripped,
not enough to be duct taped
like many of the other stools.
From the kitchen,
the short order cook
shouted, “$5.50 flapjacks, $5.50 large flapjack stack,
who got the $5.50 flaps?”
And the crescendo was him dinging the bell on the ledge of the rectangle opening
where he set the plate, only his eyes showing through.
Ed lifted one finger as if to calm the cook’s nerves
and the waitress transferred the plate to the counter.
He started to butter the pancakes.
He watched an old man bow his head before his meal.
Ed wasn’t a smug atheist,
at least not since his twenties,
right after he had read The God Delusion
and God is Not Great.
How he’d thought the religious were brainwashed, duped, and ignorant.
How he’d sneered when others prayed to nothing out there.
Now he knew nuance--that intelligence wasn’t dictated by one’s faith.
The door jingled and a homeless man burst into the diner and said,
“I have orphaned my inner child!” and then left just as abruptly.
Ed stared at the long-since dead tv
suspended from the ceiling with metal hardware,
which was turned diagonally at the end of the counter.
He supposed it didn’t matter
because anyone could be entertained by their phone these days.
Without apparent precursor, he remembered the gnarly jungle
that seeped into his dreams night after night.
Thick foliage, naturally terraced,
and a single gold nugget that shone
beneath springs turned waterfalls
when struck by a pickaxe to set it free.
Dreams folded in on themselves
like pieces of brain or
the Golgi complex in mitochondria,
like Tokyo alleys
where he met a giggling girl
and then her brass knuckled boyfriend.
Ed’s ice pack had smelled like
frozen onion rings
that he got from the restaurant
on the other side of the alley.
Lifted out of his reverie,
he smelled that smell again
as the short order dropped
a basket into the vat of oil.
Now he wanted some onion rings,
and his mouth watered,
but he would pass on the girl this time.
He felt he had lost something,
Like car keys but less concrete.
He touched his hat,
something a bit threadbare, worn by time
and at too many racetracks.
It stank like beer.
He didn’t mind it or the sweat stains on the inside.
It was lucky, so why wash it?
Ed thought he would put his kid through college
with his next score.
But the kid called him a bum
on his latest every other Saturday visit.
He wondered if he’d looked up the old timey meaning
or if he’d heard his mother say it.
The kid was kind of a jerk.
At least they had that in common
at the same age.
Ed’s old man had swallowed a gun,
right after he’d told Ed he was a smart mouth brat
and this was his future.
To hide the pain, Ed became sarcastic and mean.
But he was tired.
Too tired to be petty or cruel.
Time had flipped him too many times,
rendering his old leather hide
comfortable anywhere,
no matter how third-world.
He’d been hungry for weeks at a time,
pooped on a hillside with all the other men
in an East Indian village one morning,
lived in bedbug by-the-hour motels,
been in drunk tanks in the South,
rode a camel in the desert and ran out of water.
He’d always managed to survive.
But was that enough anymore?
The homeless man burst through the door again,
this time with two cops pursuing him.
Ed turned on his stool to face him square on.
The man shouted, “They’re trying to take it away!
They stole my inner child!”
And then the cops muscled through, behind him,
pulling the tattered man out of the diner,
one on each arm,
dragging him away.
Ed stared at the greasy, tiled floor
and wept.
