Comfort Food

Zelda never did like spaghetti. “You'll get fat if you eat that,” her mother used to point out when she was younger. “Xerox machines will five you cancer.” Warnings like this were something Zelda grew used to, and expected. Very seldom did she talk to her mother on the phone now, restraining ideas where a thing she wanted to leave in the past. Under Zelda's calm facade there was a girl very filled with anxiety, scared to use public restrooms, who counted calories, and checked the weather. Today is a Wednesday, a day for business lunches, and lucky Zelda, her client chose an Italian restaurant. Scanning her food choices, she could not understand most the names of the menu items. Rigatoni, linguini, primavera, baked ziti; what were these foreign monsters? Quarter of a way down the page she recognized an old friend, the kind of friend that is really an enemy. Parading it's curling script across the paper, with all the different sauce choices, Spaghetti sneered up at her. On a normal day, if she was in the company of friends, Zelda would have demanded they go to a different restaurant, somewhere sane; but this was Wednesday, and the client got to pick. Needles pricked her palms as she shuddered and tried not to panic. “Maybe you could just not order food...” she thought, “but that would be rude, and make a bad impression.” Logic won the argument. Kids can skip meals they do not like, but adults have to eat it all. Jaundice colored tablecloths decorated the restaurant, and stung Zelda's eyes. Ipecac syrup flashed into her head, and a memory of when her mother made her swallow it after Zelda told her that the school had fed them spaghetti for lunch. Hell hath no fury like a mother trying to do right by her daughter. Growing impatient, their waitress tapped her foot. “Fucking decide already,” Zelda screamed at herself inside. “Everyone is waiting.” Darting her eyes back and forth over the letters of the words that did not make sense to her; Zelda made a decision, or failed to make one, depending how you look at it. Crystal water glasses fell, leaves of salad rained to the floor, silverware caught in a storm clanged. Beginning to scream, a mad women with wide eyes that had once been Zelda ran from the restaurant. Anderson, the representative from Peterson Brothers Co. decided maybe his company should go in a different direction.



i wrote that for my creative writing class, guess what, its roughly 26 sentences long, and each sentence starts with a letter of the alphabet, in order, backwards from Z.

PS. at work today, sold 31+ cakes, got a fist pound from the owner. wow.