The dead flies in the windowsills only moved when people came in, or when people left. The rest of the time, they lay motionless, curled on their backs, their legs eternally crumpled skyward in a desiccated, pointless paean to mortality and filth. But when nobody came and nobody left, the motionless air was just dry heat, an untended oven. The cracked, once-glittered formica of the tabletops was speckled and scuffed by the shufflings of hundreds of thick white coffee mugs and road-weary travelers, who each passed through the diner, some sure to return, and some never seen again. The mugs always grew stained after a while, but at least they lasted – they were the only almost unbreakable, impenetrable thing she knew.
Outside, the road was a mostly-silent stretch of gray mirage slicing the desert’s dusty span. When a truck or car came rattling in through the heat, it usually deposited a thirsty loner, someone looking for a bathroom, a seat. Behind the counter, a fortress buttressed with plastic-domed apple pies, she silently poured another cup of hot brew into another one of the quiet stranger’s cups. She preferred the company of the heat, the impermanence, and the silence to anything else.
[to be continued]
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