.1

I wasn’t sure what came first. The uncertainty had me picking at the beds of my nails and rereading the same phrases in the newspaper – some article on weight loss in the South. Waste of my time. The waitress had passed by our table three times in the last two minutes, wrapped her cracked purple nail polished fingers across the linoleum. Jeffery was staring out the window, his lips moved, slight and repetitive with no words – singing the lyrics to a song no one else heard. In a moment, without looking at me he would get up and go to the bathroom. I would walk out the front door and start the yellow Carmengia in the parking lot, pick him up around back, ash a cigarette out the window and leave.

//the first moment, .1, in a series//