The waiter progresses toward the table, tray held in hand, floating as if putting on a show. But the attraction is the cuisine, the aesthetic chic. If the food is not good, everything else doesn't matter.
The waiter surrounds the table, bending to calmly present the dish. "Would you like anything else? A drink, perhaps?"
Kay looks up at him with an awkward smile.
"No, no, it's okay. Just water."
"Okay, okay," the waiter says, hesitating as if he had done something wrong.
People drink as they eat, proportionally even more drink than eat.
He had stopped for peace. He got it. Quiet mornings, quiet evenings, quiet everything. But quiet with no one in it starts to sound like absence. He looks at the bar. One drink changes nothing. One drink changes everything. He already knows which one is the lie.
The waiter, who had left with a sour taste and couldn't quite place it, shadows him again.
_"Is there something wrong with the food?"
_
_"Oh, no, no. I'm just catching a breath."
_
"If you need anything, just point at me," the waiter offers.
"Bring me something to drink then, something of your liking."
It is as though through the flurry of odd encounters, the waiter senses he is treading a line, a thread of harmony built over years, an aura of inclination, of fixation.
The waiter clarifies. "Something alcoholic, or a soda of some sort?"
The blend of emotions swirling in his head, the toxicity flavorless, yet in a single conversation he can feel it in the waiter, and he knows the disease.
The doubts and weakness built over the years, people not trusting him, usually by fault of his own. There was a time he lived in that phase: maintaining relationships, keeping his job, building a future, chasing approval.
The very thing he believed made him special, he feels nothing has changed in him after all these years. Even the waiter can smell it.
"Yes, bring me something."
His eyes open and the waiter, visibly relieved, hurries off.
Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash
The waiter is confused. He should bring something alcoholic, yet the fact that Kay neither ridiculed him nor specified soda or alcohol tells him something. He wants it. He simply doesn't know how to say it, perhaps.
Redolence for others, but for him that food is odorless. He longs for bouquet. He never hated it from the start, the others hated it. But the ones who ridiculed this very addiction are no more. They wanted me in the noise, far from a quiet place. I am not very much about that. Life goes on like a chore, and they noticed it too.
The waiter brings a bottle of red wine. With the bottle there, the food suddenly seems conquerable, and he begins his meal. In that moment he finds the quiet place he needs, however noisy the atmosphere, the pressure relieved. The thing disturbing him before is now in front of him, and he can do with it whatever he wants.
The fact that there is a choice, a choice of his own, undetermined by anyone else, he is at peace. From up front at the desk, the waiter watches: an individual, a bottle sitting there beside him, a person eating his meal.
Entry for the contest:
The Inkwell Combined Writing Prompt #28 ~ Fiction or Creative Nonfiction
This week's prompt is: "A quiet place."