Creative writing by:
Curtis Goodman
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Looking around him, Taylor saw that one again he was just one body surrounded by a queue of people. He wondered to himself, “How did I get here?” He remembered hearing something. Something unmistakable. It was a sound that he did not want to recognize and was afraid to remember; a sound that haunted him for the past two days; keeping him up nights.
Grabbing his food tray from the pile Taylor walked down the line and picked a meal from the lunch buffet. He paused by the cabbage with the serving spoon in his hand. Some days he didn’t like cabbage. It was as if it stayed with him for days. The same went for the ginger beef. Going spicy never worked out too well, Taylor thought. Moving further down the line, he took two large helpings of the red jello salad. Looking around the cafeteria, he spotted Nancy. She was wearing the same coveralls as everyone else, but she had earrings in her ears. Taylor hoped that he was the only one who had noticed.
She was sitting at a table with seven others. Taylor quickly wove his way around the cafeteria tables and sat down across from her, between two broad-shouldered 16’s.
Nancy looked up quickly, as though startled. Looking questioningly at the thought of his presence, Taylor stuck his right hand out for a shake.
“I’m Taylor,” he said, settling down in his chair and laying out his plastic cutlery and plates, leaving just enough room so that his elbows didn’t disturb the men on either side of him. When Nancy didn’t move to accept the handshake, he nervously withdrew the hand, putting it underneath the table.
For a moment the diners just sat quietly, pausing and sharing anxious glances, before they slowly resumed eating.
Nancy’s eyes rested on his for several seconds, but to Taylor, those seconds felt like a minute. He looked down at the table, at the plates nearby, and was reminded of why he had chosen the jello. The man on his right was slurping up some sort of unidentified soup or sauce. It reminded Taylor of rice pudding. It was odorless, tasteless, and formless. When the spoon left the pudding, pudding moved in to fill in the vacancy. To his left, the other man’s mashed potatoes seemed even more unappealing, and smelled as if something was off with the milk additive. Taylor could not help but think about the way that potato paste had stuck to the roof of his mouth the last time he had ate it. It was like it had filled his mouth with papier-mâché and glue.
Nancy played with her food, a bowl of purple jello salad. He watched her as she poked her jello with her plastic fork, causing the cubes to jiggle and dance. Without lifting her head or making any eye contact, Nancy asked, “When did you get back?” She said it aloud, with a strangely smug tone in her voice. The people around them didn’t seem to hear anything. They sat there in their rows, eating the slop, chomping stale bread, making slurping sounds and scraping their forks.
Then, abruptly there was that chirping sound again – a high-pitched alarm call that made everyone sit up, his or her ears alert and anticipating the impending message. View full article »