“I do hope the food is fresh here,” the woman said, sitting down.
“The freshest in the city, my Dear.”
“No point in ever eating something that’s been frozen.”
“You are a woman of discerning taste.”
“Why must we eat from a freezer when it’s just as cold outside?”
“And impeccable logic.”
“Can you imagine,” the woman said, “eating a meal that was moments before indistinguishable from a block of ice?”
The man wiped a stain off his spoon with the cuff of his sleeve. “This restaurant was Zagat-rated,” he said. “I hope you’ll be pleased.”
The woman sighed and peeked at herself in the reflection of the knife. She adjusted the tall green feather poking out from her nest of hair. “I hope so, Darling,” she said. “It’s just the damndest thing, don’t you think? How hard it is to please a simple woman.”
The man looked up from his menu through narrow lenses. “That’s you, Dear, the simplest woman in the world.”
By this time of night, there was only one employee serving tables while a hostess cleaned the evening wreckage and a manager hunched over unseen in a back office making deals with the devil. The lone waiter approached the table and the man read his nametag—TRAINEE—and laughed to himself behind the leatherbound menu. Acne had charred the eager young man’s face while dots of gray patched his mess of red hair above. He reached back and pulled a notepad from his back pocket and his pants immediately unbuttoned themselves and fell to the floor around his ankles.
The woman gasped and covered her eyes. The waiter crossed his arms against his crotch, failing to stifle the pulsating sight of his lower half. The man looked on in stolid bemusement, his bald head reflecting the waiter’s blinking pair of holographic boxers that alternated between striped and plaid patterns.
He’d heard of these kinds of flashy, high-tech undergarments being worn, but only in the vilest of settings.
“Oh, Darling,” the woman said. “Have you ever seen such dreadfulness? In a well-regarded establishment? And simply the ugliest pair of underwear I have ever seen!”
“I’m so sorry, folks,” the waiter said, pulling up his pants. His loose-fitting slacks seemed to flutter and balloon the more he struggled with them, like large black garbage bags. “That’s happened to me every time I take my notepad from my pocket. This has not been my night.”
The man looked again at the waiter’s nametag. “First night on the job, young man?”
“No. Well, yes. Unfortunately, my real name is actually Traneé, so I’ve never worn another nametag.”
“This must be some kind of joke,” the woman said.
“The only funny thing about it is that stuff like this happens all the time,” the waiter said. “Why, not seconds before you came in I accidentally dipped my hands into a pot of scalding hot sanitizer, charring them beyond repair.” He showed a pair of mangy hands, scarred and sopping with blood and puss. “I guess you could say that every day is my first day, over and over again.”
“How gruesomely torturous,” the man said. “I’m quite the butterfingers myself. I sympathize but my darling wife here may be a touch more difficult to comfort. Perhaps you could recommend a wine?”
“Oh, I can’t bear the thought of drinking,” the woman said before the waiter could respond. “Please, boy, away with you. If you can’t bring us another waiter, clean yourself up and bring us a basket of rolls.”
The waiter scurried off and the woman snatched the menu in front of her and read it for the first time. Her husband continued to study his copy with the acute silence of a careful convict mapping escape plans. He bit at his lower lip. The woman threw her menu back down on the table. Nothing but numbers rounded to the nearest ten and garbled phrases of false elegance.
“I cannot believe this place, Simon,” the woman said. “The drudgery and insolence a-a-and ghastliness they try to pass as service.”
“Mm,” the man said.
“Aren’t you listening? Service is important to people, Simon. People need to eat, don’t they? The human race must survive, Simon. And how do they expect us to nourish our bodies with a impish mountebank running around sticking his hands in acid?”
He put his menu down and removed his reading glasses. “Just some rust in the gears, my Dear. Natural for this sort of trade. Let’s stay until close while they smooth out the wrinkles. The fish looks quite good.” He moved his hand across the table and placed it on hers. “Look, we’re the last table in the restaurant. Let’s go easy this time and sit and eat and embrace the end of the night.”
The whole restaurant had filtered out save for one other couple, much younger than Simon and his wife. Empty wine bottles and a mess of food-encrusted dishes littered their table. The boy’s head was planted facedown in a plate of mashed potatoes. “Well, that’s enough to lose to your appetite,” the woman said. “The only other couple in the restaurant is passed out drunk—stinking drunk!”
Flies had gathered and hovered above him while the girl sprawled in her chair upside down, her skirt south, a rare New York Strip steak flopping out from between her vertical legs, dribbling red juice into a puddle on the floor. They were each completely still.
“Can’t we just eat at another restaurant, Darling?” the woman said. “This mess-hall hasn’t a single shred of decency.”
“It’s too late, Dear,” the man said. “All the other restaurants are closed. Ah, the rolls have arrived.”
The waiter returned and placed a basket on the table. His hands had been bandaged with duct tape but his pants had now expanded to the size of body bags. They were being held up by two live eels slung over his shoulders and biting at his beltloops. “The folks in the kitchen jimmied these up for me,” he said. “Seems to be helping with my, you know, problem.”
“Darling, what is happening with the bread?” the woman said. A napkin covered the warm basket on the table, rumbling as a tremor in the fabric. The man lifted the napkin and placed it back down again to muffle the piercing errant squeal of the basket’s contents.
“It appears to be a litter of rodents,” the man said. The woman began to fan her flushed face.
“Perhaps I misheard you,” the waiter said. “You did say you wanted a basket of moles, correct?”
“And what may I ask are you doing with moles in your kitchen?” the woman said. “That is absolutely disgusting. I wish to speak with the manager.”
The waiter was flabbergasted. “Please ma’am. The manager is busy closing up shop. If you hadn’t noticed, we run a tight ship here, and it will be my neck if I screw up again on his watch. Besides, he’d tell you the same thing as me: We have the finest moles in the city.”
“Okay,” the man mumbled after a silence. “Very amusing. If you could please remove the vermin from the table, my wife and I would like to finish our meal.”
“We’ll be lucky to even start it,” the woman said.
The waiter collected their menus and took the basket under his arm. “We’ll have the fish special, to share,” the man told him. The waiter walked away, sneaked his bandaged hand under the throbbing napkin and popped a mole into his mouth, tearing off its tiny hairless head with his teeth as if a piece of tough beef jerky.
The woman had her head down in her folded arms, sobbing. Her head-feather brushed against the petals of the flower centerpiece on the table, and each petal wilted and died with the contact, falling shriveled off the stem. The man was rather thankful she didn’t see the waiter walk away. There was nothing left for them to do now except wait and eat. Eating—one of the first things one learns how to do, and the first ability to go when one’s earthly mind cannot control and maintain one’s earthly body. “Imagine,” the woman had said several months prior in a nightgown at the hospital, “having to be fed by liquid through a tube.” Never one for complex decisions, the man didn’t think it sounded all that bad. Nevertheless, he was confident in his menu choice.
“Oh, Simon,” the woman said between sniffles. She picked up her head. Mascara streaked her cheeks. “I do hope they take the fish heads off before serving us. What I detest—more than anything in this godforsaken world—is an entire fish on a plate, head and all.” She stopped crying. “That’s not food, it’s a wall mount. Wouldn’t you agree?”
He cleared his throat and took a sip from his water glass, instantly spitting it out across the table in a projectile spray. Boiling hot droplets pelted the woman’s face and sent pale caked makeup melting, singeing the flesh below. “This water is boiling hot,” the man said. The woman cried out in agony and her face looked to be shot at close range with a 12-gauge. The man’s water began to bubble over and the glass, still cool to the touch, shattered into pieces in his hand.
Reaching across the table, the man was trying to gently wipe the face of his wife when the waiter returned with a large platter. He placed it in between the couple and the man saw that it was a garbage can lid holding a large sea bass on its side—head, tail and all. The fish, lacking eyelids, stared blankly above.
“Enjoy, folks,” the waiter said. With a satisfied smile he buzzed off. They were, after all, the last table of the night.
“Oh, Darling, it’s hideous,” the woman said, dabbing the blood and gunk off her forehead. “Absolutely hideous. How is one even supposed to eat it?”
“Very carefully, my Dear,” the man said. “It’s a delicate process. Some say the best meat on a fish is near the head. I think the idea is, you work a little for your food and reap an even greater reward.”
“Well, you must be mistaken because we are at a restaurant, where one shouldn’t by definition be required to ‘work’ for anything. This place is a nightmare. I’m hurting and hungry. And that thing looks horrid, and smells foul. I don’t think I will ever eat again.”
On the table, atop the aluminum platter, the sea bass stretched its gills and wheezed.
“Ah, what a nice surprise,” the man said. “I didn’t know this was a sushi restaurant. You like sushi, don’t you, Dear?”
It flopped its tail, banging against the metal, and wiggled onto its other side. It faced the woman and centered its eyes on her. With its fins, the fish dragged its body off the platter and across the table, inching its way closer to the woman.
“No,” she said. “This can’t be happening…”
The sea bass expanded in size the closer it got to the woman. The man watched its ugly underbitten mouth open, wider and wider, until it was large enough to place over the woman’s entire head—feather, nest and all. Its ragged teeth clenched around her neck and it gnawed upon her head in silence, slowly devouring her physical body from the neck down.
As he watched his wife’s dwindling lower half vanish into the ever-growing orifice of a common sea creature, the man wondered where the rest of her had gone, and if the fish had some sort of aqua-litter box where he could collect her remains. Never one to get bogged down in the details of complicated scenarios, the man calmly got up from the table, pushed his chair in, and exited the restaurant into the blustery cold.
He left a twenty-five-percent tip on the table.
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