EPTIt was the late morning, the sun was peeking through the clouds to give the impression the day was going to be a decent one. As it was nearing noon, people were flooding into the café to get their daily dose of the various liquid calories on offer.
I was sitting on a two person table, occupying the one seat. A man appeared, from seemingly nowhere and placed himself on the empty seat before me. I tried my best to follow the social decorum and take no notice, looking busy and occupied with my emails and funny shit on the internet.
My best efforts to be cool were matched by this guy’s efforts to go noticed. He put his bag down to his right and put onto the table a box of chips and fried chicken. He was a middle aged man of South Asian origin. Were I incredibly prejudiced, I would deduce from his decaying hair, fluffy moustache, cheap shirt and a hideous red and blue backpack that was surely stolen off a grubby school kid, that he was an immigrant IT worker brought in by some struggling local start up to do all the tedious work his superiors seek to avoid. He was innately alien and pitiable, and I felt insane discomfort both from his presence and all the prejudices stirred up within me by his caricaturized appearance and demeanor.
The next fifteen minutes became an ordeal of sorts as he began to indulge in his greasy brunch like it was his last supper. My laptop monitor was all that stood between my line of sight and a fastfood burlesque performance. The slurping at falling bits of chicken, ripping and morselling of the bitty balls of moist breadcrumbs into his mouth all became grotesquely erotic, such was the concentration that took over his being, for those fifteen minutes he, and his 2.99 box meal became one, he treated each wing and thigh with the adoring voraciousness of a man overwhelmed by his desire to orally please a woman of every perfection.
Then the worst thing ever happened. We made eye contact. I guess it was not hard to see that my face was a full moon of arrogant, morbid fascination as he stopped in his chicken grease-mauling tracks to give a look back that was enough to destroy worlds. I immediately looked back down to my laptop as if I had caught the attention of a lecturer who may ask me questions about a book I hadn’t read for that seminar. He continued to munch, only now with piercing eyes of searing resentment, focused on me and me alone. This continued for many minutes until there was no more room in his physiology for chips, chicken and my condescension, and that he should get back to coding.
He stood up, grabbed his bag and the empty box of chicken (it still irked me that he would not wash his fingers of the shiver inducing shininess one associates with fried chicken before continuing to touch more things) and left, but before he exited, he gave me one more resentful look, muttering something to himself that he probably had every right to mutter, before leaving my existence forever.
“Goodbye Richard Parker”, I said to myself in an Indian accent.
THE END
.
