Alo Carter-Bigley

Just a piece from a book Im working on!

Sitting in a booth with to small a gap between table and chair can be an excruciating experience for someone with a bit of a gut. The three by five piece of fiberglass covered particle-board created a new chasm between my lungs and liver and may have been what kept my breathing shallow. It also may have been my interest in the ropes and pulleys that made his arms work.

            He was meticulously ripping the little heads off of every pink and blue packet in the sugar bowl and pouring them into the two waters the decidedly dour waitress had given us. God forbid he mixed his colors. He squeezed the two small lemon wedges she had left over the tops of our mismatched cups. I watched the chalky yellow juice disperse like smoke from an extinguished candle floats away.

            “Lemonade?” He pushed a cup towards me as he drowned his lemon rind beneath his ice.

“You gave me blue.”  He watched me as he reached into his pocket and pulled out two skinny black and white striped straws, he put one into his own cup and sucked a little to hard trying to fight the physics of that stupid f*****g straw.

“Didn’t you mean to give me pink? I thought you were trying to passively flirt by reminding me I was female.”

“No I just do my best to break gender stereotypes. You just seem like a blue kind of girl to me.”

“You know the waitress is going to hate us for the mess you’ve made. I saw on Reddit, that people who make their own lemonade are more likely to leave a bad tip. So as she’s watching us right now, she could be forming conclusions about us.”

“She could be plotting to leave a sexy green giant in my cream chipped beef.”

“She could be thinking about licking the underside of my buns.”

“I don’t know who wouldn’t.”

“There you go with the flirting thing again, these attempts are so far out there I’m not even sure if they’re hits or misses.”

It was silent for a moment, as he continued to drink from his little straw I began to shrink again. On the inside at least. There never seemed to be a balance between my inside and outside. As one grew bigger the other seemed to grow smaller. There were only a few things that made the outside shrink and fall away.

“Riding a cow.”

“What?” I’m sure there was some kind of painting, of a sculpture, of a s****y poem,  about a nebula in his brain that explained this, unfortunately for me, he just as easily could have been having an autistic moment.

“You asked me one illegal thing I would want to do but never did. I would want to break into a farm and ride a cow.” I was amazed that whenever I rode past one of Bucks County’s many dairy farms that a cow’s knobby knees could hold their own swollen bodies let alone another person on top. I would never subject a cow to trying to hold me.

“Okay, I know I’m the one that asked that question but I’m going to take us down a different road here…um…do you want me to ask the waitress to bring us some straws? You seem to be struggling with that little coffee stirrer.”

“I was actually glad she didn’t bring us regular straws, I always use coffee stirrers. They don’t let you suck it all down in one gulp, so it’s a simple reminder to take my time and enjoy life ya’ know? You gotta WORK for the thing you want.” He took another labored suck at the bit of his straw. “It was quite rude of me to assume you wouldn’t want a regular straw I suppose. Would you like me to right this wrong?”

He spoke like a f*****g pod person.

He was very pretentious.

I was hungry, as always, so I ate that s**t up