PDF

Waitress Hopping


by Jennifer Donnell


You're the story I'll never write, except I will and will again, probably. You're an albatross, flighty and a scavenger, but that's already too much about you. 

I can say you're small, to me, or massive in size, or miniature. I can say what I like about you, or don't, perhaps in the same instance. I like that you're smart and kind about the plight of hypothetical people. You don't rule out the existence of aliens. Your junk is in all the right places, until the closets come unglued.

I don't like that waitress, last week, a Tuesday. She was blonde, fine for a blonde, but not the kind of beauty you'd bewitch yourself with unless it was pathological. You apologized. It was, you said, a twinkle in your eye and tone to your voice. You wanted credit for acknowledging  it, sure I noticed.

I had, but was talking myself out of it before you opened your big mouth. I'd taken you to lunch, my treat. It didn't make sense that a forgettable waitress would be important enough to make the scooped neckline of my sailor striped shirt feel like a trash bag.

Or, today, when early summer sweated the long pants off every woman under the age of thirty. Did I notice the way you looked at them for one, two, three seconds; then didn't, partial to their short-shorts. It was sly how you kept them in your line of sight, almost imperceivable. 

Almost.




























Endcap