Ramekins

      Have you ever been penetrated by the shadow of Lunch? Pacified in a digestive fugue, in the tinted sunlight of a vacant restaurant? 

     The plate lies before you, stripped bare and made pathetic by your satiation. A napkin, undone and stained, forms a petrified barrier reef at table's edge. Fork, knife, and spoon are strewn athwart one another, bred by your complacent and accidental eye into some sphinx's skeleton, or the wreckage of a déclassé sputnik, tainted with wads of aioli infused with a tomato jam.

     Somewhere in the depths of the kitchen, hidden behind the still swinging screen of a double-hinged door, you can hear the violence of the culinary craft. Ramekins cast down ring the reverberant lay of brushed and stainless steel. Tongs and tangs emit a clangor. Some sanguine reduction evaporates in the bottom of a pan, lurching - a seething cataract of rising, momentary souls. 

     You just know, as in a dream, that, lying in an obscure corner, shrouded by a tabernacle of magnetic cabinet doors, is the sweating comma of an undercooked shrimp, its tightened roseate pulp gathering motes of food particulate and dust along a blind surface.

     And O, how the day wanes! Revelations such as these can hardly be expected to penetrate your unmanned consciousness. You recline in your chair, allowing your belly to distend over your belt line. A triangle of attenuated sunlight creeps over the tablecloth toward your cell phone; once the hot polygon reaches that dormant device, it steps up onto the glass screen, exciting a shimmer of inactive pixels from their turgid sea bed. Some flakes of buttered croissant wedged in the top seam of the phone case are beginning to incandesce, to attract your languid eye. 

     You feel the distant, not unpleasant pain of a steel watchband biting into your swollen, fatty wrist. Lifting the watch to your face, as if to tell the time, you bring it into the shaft of sunlight, where its bezel collects the luminescence into a glowing, liquid point. Under the glass lens of the watch face, a crosshair reticle of cardinal hours drowns in the bright goo of a vacant shine show.

     And somewhere, swimming in a miasmic spray of non-sequential minutes, you begin to register a certain sound. It is this sound, distinct from others, which perks up your ears. Why this sound? Because it is directed at you - it alludes to your inert body, slouched in that varnished oak chair, before which the sunken remains of a midday luncheon, all too desperately and voraciously consumed, are splayed. 

     It is the sound of footsteps you hear: it must be the waiter. 

     But this detail causes you to sit up a little straighter, to palm a sudden sheet of cold sweat from the back of your neck. You look around at the hollow dining area, now alienated from your surroundings by this thought: that you have no recollection of the waiter's face, nor can you reconstruct even an approximation of his speech, his palette of honed waiter's gestures. Has a waiter even seen you yet? Have you even been helped? You can hardly recall what it was that you ordered, and the unidentifiable remains, scattered in dim, mutilated clots across a variegated village of porcelain plates, bowls, and saucers is hardly a reliable indication.

     Nonetheless, you hear the steps of someone drawing near.

     Your eyes widen slightly as you sit up in your sloshing mental bathtub of gastronomic fatigue. You scan the room, which remains consistently empty while the footsteps grow louder. The surrounding tables and booths array about you in an equidistant radius, seeming as inert as a manicured hedge in front of a veterinarian's office. 

     You can even hear the fine compression of carpet fibres as each shoe's sole imprints its outline in those brief polyester depths. 

     It is these fibrous depths to which your eye, for lack of anything real to sink its teeth into, is drawn. Here is the final course of your meal: your last recourse of spotting the being who steals yet closer to you as each second elapses. 

     You see: a field of mottled grey, interrupted by plump carmine chevrons. The apex of these stacked shapes is centered on your table. Your throat is wicked of all moisture by this detail.

     Focus.

     No vacuum's suction has been absolute enough to pull the world out of these soft velveteen coils. Like an expanse of mangroves, encrusted with layers of cheapest industrial shampoo, the bundled loops of carpet fibre are locked into ranks upon which monocellular essences are borne. 

     God commanded that no one should bow down before a graven image. But, hidden within every prohibition is the negative image of 'Thou Shalt Not.' In the carving of any stone idol, the chippings and castings-off constitute the nemesis of figuration. In the devourment of any silken brioche burger, the raw elements, the food-stuffs which are sprayed upon the four air-conditioning currents of the dining room, become the nemesis and undoing of any accomplished recipe...

     But, in the end, no amount of waiting will yield a visual confirmation of He Who Approaches. Quit expecting the check to fall on that tablecloth, which is now seemingly miles away...