Friendly Food Face

Too much coffee and not enough sleep at the all night diner sometime past 3AM. Sitting, drinking really bad diner coffee followed by ice tea and reading a newspaper. The ones printed on newsprint with ink. The waitress, Bethany, according to the name tag, is her usually shiny happy self, busy hustling the few diners at this hour. Other people like me, lost too early in the morning during the middle of the week. This is just another typical early morning night for me.

This night I see the penguin first, runaway from his zoo to explore the meaning of humanity again. He reads a newspaper too, but it’s off of his smart phone. A cup of coffee by his side, always filled, always hot and black. He likes his coffee, like he likes his women I guess. On the table. I never have figured out how he holds the cup in his flippers in order to drink it.

One by one, as I look up from my paper, or put it down to take a sip of coffee or tea the diners turn into different beasts one more strange or unusual than the next. The old man who’s here every single night until dawn, keeping to himself and mumbling under his breath looks more like an ape. The writer typing away at his laptop is reptilian, still typing away and wearing the beat down fedora. When he takes a drink from his soda, instead of reaching for it his tongue lashes out at the glass instead. Right now the only other diners is a threesome of young folk sitting at a faraway booth. Two of them are still making out on one side, plant like and now doing things that seem still sexual but alien too. The one on the opposite end still looks human and looks at me with despair, if not fear at what is going on right across from him.

The busser occasionally wanders out from the kitchen carrying his bus tub. Now that I look he doesn’t move, has an ashen look, he being a statue. Frozen, completely silent and still, until you take your attention away. When I look back he has moved away and is frozen at another table that has been bussed and wiped clean.

The cook, before tall and skinny, is now a fat and furry monster banging on pots and pans, frying the eggs and ham, flipping pancakes and so it goes this morning. I won’t order food until he is the furry monster. Never trust a skinny cook, right?

When you’re spending your time at 3AM at an all night diner, with too much coffee and little to no sleep for weeks on end, this is normal. That is until some time after I get my plate of food. Nothing fancy. A couple of pancakes, fried eggs over medium, and sausage links. I’ve forgotten about it, absorbed in the news of the day as I work my way through the newspaper, beginning from the end and working my way to the front page.

The food catches my attention that it is getting cold, she has a friendly, but faintly deviant voice. Sweet but cold at the same time. I look down at my plate as the combination of sausage, eggs, and pancakes grins at me with that Cheshire Cat smile you’d find out of some kind of Wonderland that would only exist in a mathematician’s head.

Without too much thought, and a with a thank you to my breakfast, I hurriedly eat then finish the coffee and ice tea. I fold up my newspaper and leave a few dollars on the table. I get my ticket at the counter where my waitress handles the receipt and the money with a smile and a flourish. It is only as I leave and turn back to say goodbye that I see that Bethany is a clown dressed and working as a waitress. She smile and says goodbye too, her smile with all her teeth is inviting in a sinister way.