Karstfleisch

      A thick plate of revealing light hits her skin and she shrinks back under the shadow of the patio awning. But it only takes a second for you to see what nature apparently refuses to hide: on either side of her greyish nose, flourishing around it like a pair of Bacchic banisters around a grand staircase, are areas of raised, vibrant irritation. She is already taking a long, hard draught from her cup of ice water. Through that vessel's clear pebbled plastic, you observe how her roseate patches open up and absorb the stray moisture.

     Eventually, when her arm gets tired, she sets her cup down on the faux-marble tabletop at which she is sitting. You can't be more than ten feet away from her; you and your wife are sitting under the full light of the afternoon sun, taking advantage of these last warming rays before the obsidian chill arrives and makes both you and your spouse doubt that you are really awake for many months on end. 

     Your beloved Patricia clutches the top of your hand, preventing you from opening the heavy, laminated menu. 

     "How do I look today? Am I beautiful?"

     The young woman in the shadows, within earshot of this obligatory prompt, averts her wild, bulging eyes, drawing her own menu up around her so that nothing south of the bridge of her nose is visible from your vantage point.

     "Yeah, definitely."

     Patricia accepts the verbal token, leaving you to your menu while she takes up her phone and evaluates herself in the image generated by the reverse-facing camera. 

     What you find when you peer down at the menu is not the usual fare, to say the least.

     Instead of headings for 'beverages,' 'entrées,' and 'sweetmeats,' you are met with a single condensed paragraph in a font so small as almost to deny the reader any access to it. But the proprietor of this dining establishment did not expect a patron like you: a man of optics. You fish in your silken breast pocket, fingers lingering over a selection of implements made of frigid, cylindrical, knurled steel. After getting your fill of fondling these pieces, you find the specific item you seek: a weighty, milled eye loop with a felt rim meant to reduce friction when slid against a surface.

     Setting the recessed lens over the paragraph's opening line, you read the following:

"I know I will die very soon and that my corpse will rot unnoticed under some quaking yellow trellis, soaking in the accidental midnight piss of passersby whose bladders brim with beer. But I will never seek a safe harbor. I will never sign up for anyone's 'treatments.' No one will ever get the satisfaction of seeing the yawning amphitheater of my throat with its uvular chandelier as I divulge the burden of my condition. I refuse to slave away for a pittance, just so I can go to some overtly understated boutique with its salvific salve philosophies, unguents and creams. I've got karstfleisch. This is my story, and at some point, even people like me get to put their stories on a plate for discerning judges to sample. With a synchronous press from my two thumbs, the thin, fragile surface that passes itself off for red inflammation will crack and collapse into the yielding pudding beneath. This is my crème brûlée. I don't want a confidant or a therapist. I want an unctuous gourmand. When he finally comes, he will not hesitate to break open my condition and suck it clean, discarding my spent husk out back where it belongs, by the dumpsters and pallets..."

     You look up at your wife, stunned. She slides a petite, gleaming spoon across the table to you, slips her purse strap over her shoulder, and walks off toward a car that has just sailed up to the curb. Climbing into the back seat, she slams the door, cracks the window, and says to you through the cigarette already propped between her lips:

     "I won't be there when you get home."