Marquita Sod

      You were never one for buying into your own delusions. But, with the way the wind has been blowing, and the eyes of everyone you meet have been glistening like sightless marbles of beluga caviar, you've come to realize that there is not much reason to resist what you feel anymore. Everyone is reeling with their own private vacuities; the weather is getting colder; irises are dilating, unable to focus on anything now without a costly burst of spiritual effort which might better be expended elsewhere. This is all to say that, today, you have made the conscious decision to succumb to automatism. And, though you are physically walking around in public, moving at an even clip down the sidewalk, entering and leaving businesses - what you see is not what is before your eyes.

     You discovered, while crossing the street and watching for turning cars through your peripheral vision, that you could not see the moment as it occurred. You could only see something unfolding miles away. And, with the intuitive knowledge of a dream's backstory, you knew that the transaction which you beheld was being carried out, on one of its ends, by a woman named 'Marquita Sod.'

     Now, Marquita Sod enters the dining hall - a cavernous brick chamber with octagonal walls. She walks between tables of varying heights, teeming with hunched bodies: bulbous eyes protrude from unaccountable faces as meals are decimated under the gnashing pressure of a million teeth. Once she is in front of the gallery of restaurants (compressed into cubic booths lining the walls), she takes her meal voucher out of her pocket and studies it: "Good for one lunch of $15 or less." 

     Marquita Sod looks up to consider her options. She approaches the line for the sub sandwich chain, which is doubled back on itself in a sauntering serpentine. Before her, when she assumes her place in line, is the shaven back of a tan head; its bristle of black hairs twinkles with sweat, pools in a fold of fatty fleisch packed under the base of the skull. A trace of perspired adrenaline fuses with the odor of provolone on a slice of seven-grain honey oat bread.

     The line makes minute progressions. Marquita Sod is a few feet away from a broad chip rack. The corpulent Mexican in front of her leans over to scan the available flavors: "Mighty Mesquite BBQ," "Cheddar Island," "Cecelia's Cellar of Vinegar and Salt," "Baked Strata," and a lone bag of "Slaked Dill." Gills of sweat seep through the back of the Mexican's grey zip-up parka, accenting his crenelated physique. He turns his head, revealing the corners of his eye and mouth. Rills of sweat are trickling from the edge of his neatly trimmed sideburn to the bulge of his chin, where globules of the polluted liquid hang, quiver, and drop. He licks his lips, which are puckered out like the beak of an infant hawk. The saliva leaves a layer of gloss on an erect mole growing in the center of his philtrum. 

     Someone's shoe kicks Marquita Sod's heel. 

     The line makes minute progressions.

     Marquita Sod now turns the corner, sidling up to the glass, which shields the many compartments of meat, cheese, and sundry protein below her.

     "Bread?" asks the employee, who is also vaguely Hispanic. 

     "Italian herb-and-cheese; veggie dee-lite." 

     "Do you want sissinch or twevinch?"

      Marquita Sod hesitates, squinting her deep-set eyes which are dazzled by beaming screens of green and yellow light. The employee has directed his eyes toward Marquita Sod, but his vision does not quite span the buffer of air between them. Someone to the left of Marquita Sod gives her a nudge with his obese hip. 

     The line makes minute progressions.

     "Ma'am? Sissinch? Twevinch?"

     "...Let's do six."

     "Six? Inch?"

     "Six-inch veggie dee-lite."

     "Okay, what kind of cheese...?"

     Marquita Sod stoops over the curved glass, hovering above the place where cheese is available to be seen, pondered, and chosen. Some cheese is white. Some cheese is impregnated with red or green cellules of pepper - that would be Pepper Jack. Some cheese is a celluloid curtain which bars any clear view of one's future. Some cheese is yellow. All cheese is triangular.

     The line makes minute progressions.

     "Let's do pepper-jack," says Marquita Sod. 

     "Pepper-jack?"

     "...Yeah."

     The employee removes a 'unit' of pepper-jack cheese from its black plastic compartment. His molasses fingers dismantle this portion of pepper-jack cheese, stripping the moist triangles of their wax paper garment, which he slops into the trash bin under the preparation table. Then he mounts the triangles of pepper-jack cheese in a layered enfilade on the Italian Herb-and-Cheese bread. The Mexican, standing ahead of Marquita Sod in the line, takes a peek at her sandwich and then at her before making a minute progression toward the employee manning the register. 

     "Toasted?"

     "Yeah," says Marquita Sod.

     The employee rolls his murky eyes; one of them contains a pale discoloration - a slight circular shadow - surrounded by a coral network of blood vessels. An ash-stained elbow prods Marquita Sod in the side of her breast. Marquita Sod moves down the line. Another employee - an Indian woman with hard black nodes arrayed around her nose - slides the shell of Marquita Sod's six-inch veggie dee-lite, with its shellack of provolone cheese, across the translucent, mutilated slab of the preparation table.

     "Widge ingredients you want?" she says.

     Deposits of condensed water seem to tremble under the percussion of busywork, beaded upon the thrashed vegetal matter lying in the square plastic buckets. 

     "Spinach?"

     The employee grabs and immediately discards a heap of lettuce shreds before redirecting her hand toward the proper shrubbery.

     "Okay?"

     "Olive?"

     Black cross-sectioned zeroes tumble over cerise tomatic discs and settle where they fall.

     "Okay?"

     "Um, pickles?"

     The employee dispatches the sliced pickles, whose centers evince ragged wounds from the burrowings of stolid foreign fingers.

     "Alrigh', anything else?"

     Marquita Sod sweeps her eyes over the broad expanse of ingredients she has yet to invite into her six-inch veggie dee-lite sandwich. 

     "Onion?"

     "Okay, ongion."

     "Green pepper?"

     "Okay?"

     "Shredded carrot?"

     "Shred carrot, okay?"

     "Garden-air?"

     The employee momentarily freezes, her stunted glove-sheathed hands suspended over the borderline between the banana peppers and the guacamole.

     "You want the jardinnaire?"

     "Yes."

     "I don't know what's that," says the employee with her lips pulled back from violently bleached teeth.

     The worried Mexican standing in front of Marquita Sod in the line revolves his moribund torso and, modulating his words through a chortling gasp for air, says:

     "Ma'am, I think she wants the giardiniera." 

     "Yeah," says Marquita Sod. "The Jordan-Air."

     "Oh, okay..."

     Now, Marquita Sod and the employee coast jointly up to the sauce station. Here, warped by the diffraction of the rounded glass sneeze-guard, cloudy bottles of viscous, tangy reductions are seated in their circular slots. The screwed-on butt plate of each sauce bottle bears a sticker whose color corresponds to the content within. There are roughly ten condiments from which to choose.

     "You want sauce?" asks the employee, her latex-shrouded hand already nearing a likely option.

     "Yeah, let me get oil-and-vinegar?"

     The employee fetches the required bottles - oil of olive and florid vinegar. Holding the bottles in both fists, she dispenses a controlled linear splash of each liquid down the length of Marquita Sod's six-inch veggie dee-lite sandwich. Not a molecule of the oil-and-vinegar escapes the osmotic surfaces of razed vegetables, nor are they spared from the thirst of the oven-fired Italian Herb-and-Cheese bread.

     "Okay?"

     "Salt-and-Pepper? And just a little oregano."

     "Salt-pepper, organo."

     With her six-inch veggie dee-lite sandwich assembled, Marquita Sod strafes over to the blockade of cash registers at her right. The next employee there swaddles the sandwich, tamping the folds of the wrapper into themselves with her short paleolithic digits. As Marquita Sod awaits the completion of this process, she absently relocates the meal voucher in her pocket while she watches the Mexican who had been before her in line: he toddles off into the clamoring depths of the dining hall, his specially engineered sub sandwich dangling inside of its oblong sac. Soon, that sandwich will be collapsed, deconstructed, and mingling with unregistered juices that persist in gastric darkness. 

     "The total is den seventy-five," says the employee with caramelized lips. 

     Marquita Sod convenes with the glowing screen projecting from the register, which confirms this cost. 

     "Ten seventy-five? That's how much I owe?"

     "J'yes. J'your dotal is den seventy-five, ma'am."

     Marquita Sod looks at her meal voucher, the smudged bluish ink there reminding her that she can redeem a lunch valued at or below $15. But is the voucher exhausted only when one has redeemed it in full, or is it immediately voided when exchanged for one (1) meal?

     "So you're telling me that one (1) six-inch veggie dee-lite sandwich, with toppings, only costs ten dollars and seventy-five cents?"

     "If j'you vant to pay more, j'you can add a chips and a drink."

     At this point, the person who has been standing in line behind Marquita Sod is edging closer to her; his sandwich is now a fully realized product with an unseen content, spun snugly into a wrapper, through which the fulgurant suggestions of a flattened oat and a dislocated tomato seed make themselves feverishly known. The dweller in the line careers minutely into Marquita Sod's protuberant rear-end with his hip bone. Marquita Sod folds over the counter, automatically extending the meal voucher in a manner reminiscent of tectonic catastrophe. The cashier receives the voucher into a henna'ed palm. 

     "Do j'you want to add a chips and a drink?'

     A deliberate hesitation charged with inexpressible malice.

     "No. Just the six-inch veggie dee-lite."

     "Okay.................................................................................................................................. Thank j'you, ma'am. Have a nice day."

     As Marquita Sod withdraws with her swinging six-inch veggie dee-lite sandwich, a tower of green cup lids collapses onto the drain grille of the soft drink fountain, where they remain until the restaurant's closing several hours later.

     And it is only when the lids are re-stacked and set to rights during the following morning shift that you blink your eyes and find yourself to be once again where you are: in the mouth of a pitch-black alley with your legs spread out before you in a V. Your face is swollen from repeated, calculated jabs delivered by an unknown assailant who appears not to have been in a rush as he beat you. Nothing has been taken from your pockets. Your watch, of not inconsiderable value, is still strapped about your wrist. 

     Circumstances are such that you are left to conclude the following: that someone saw an opportunity to relish in pummeling your face. And that person did not hesitate to do so.