5:30 am: Highway 290: Willow City Diner continued
He paused, torn between blessing and damning the food, and after a moment of nothing he lifted one of the eggs and cracked it with the handle of his knife. He rolled the egg between his palms feeling the cold shell crinkle under his touch, then pulled the rent armor away in one multifaceted sheet. The fragile, while albumin shined like a clean soul under the fluorescent lamps. He severed it in two, chewed it slowly, felt it stick as his throat pushed it down into his stomach.
The bread had no taste besides the rusted belch left by the toaster that tortured it. The thought of ingesting the second egg crossed his mind but didn't leave a footprint. The lone egg, stuck in the fissure in the plate, mourned its companion.
He looked through the window once more.
It was always her eyes. Sunk deep into her face, they still burned like winter's sun setting, cold behind frosted windows. She never closed her eyes, never blinked, as if she were searching forward with her life focused into her gaze. She was fighting, even though her body lay on a bed that did all the moving for her. Wires led from her loose skin to boxes that hummed like microwave ovens--a web tangling his fragile moth. He watched her quiver fitfully, but the web held her tight to the earth.
He heard her unspoken wish in each hiss of the respirator. "Let me fly."
A lanky teenager in a MARINES t-shirt slouched out of the kitchen and sat down beside the gum-chewing girl. She stopped staring long enough to make strangling gestures at the boy's throat then point across the diner. The boy turned and gawked for several seconds as if he were judging the distance before leaping out a bedroom window. His eyes widened, and he turned back to the girl and bellowed, "holy shit!"
Time to go.
He tried to divine a price from the scratchings on the soggy ticket, but the ink bled into some mockery of abstract art. He left a twenty-dollar bill on top of the check, half out of charity, half out of spite.
Tubes tangled like plastic kudzu taking root in her flesh. If any one of them failed, she could fly, but he knew which would be the easiest to bend to human will.
The memory caught in his throat like a seized piston as the door hissed to a close on its athritic hinge behind him.
The tube whispered in his hand. It was much longer than he thought it would be. He wondered how they fit so much of it into her.
Free from the plastic pipe, she smiled--just a twitch at the corners of her mouth, but he caught it.
The engine grumbled awake, and he swung the nose of the old Ford toward the highway. The sun climbed over the tops of the trees to peer at him and lit up the dust and bug spatters on the windshield. He moved his hands on the steering wheel until they slid into the places where her hands used to rest. He could still feel her. She was in the moan of the tires, in the clatter of the engine. She still drove from where he sat, so he held the wheel and rode with her, but he was still running from his own reflection in the rearview mirror.
She finally closed her eyes, and a rattling whisper slipped out on her own breath.
"kiss me"
Her lips were cold.
