Fiction: The Waiting Room

By Tom Stuckey

 

“It really is a lottery, she never smoked, never drank and only ate well. It’s not fair.” 

I don’t know what I’m doing here, it can’t be right.

“She was only 55, exercised every day too,”

Maybe if I fake that I’m asleep he will leave me alone, or better a seizure, I could be anyone, he doesn’t know what I got.

“every day really is a lottery.”

Just nothing there today, these days are the hardest, gimmie something. The pictures are all of the outdoors, painted by an armature, probably in their spare time. This one of a boat beached, fading in the sun. £40. 

“I mean where is the fairness, you have all these people eating fast food and using drugs,”

I stopped using drugs, and now my dreams are more real than the day. And why for the love of God do they have rolling news on the TV!

“Terrible isn’t it, just terrible, all these foreigners.”

 I don’t know why she is not smiling; she has the most life out of everything here. Maybe it is because of watching out from behind that desk every day, at the dead sea of waiters. Watching them slowly creeping towards her, like the coming tide. Eyes on her, imagining what life is like for her. What she likes, how she chooses the clothes and the perfume in the morning. Why she never has to wait out here, lost at sea with the wrecks. 

“Nuclear War, he might,”

I’m a bad person, thinking this, about the shape of her breasts, what her nipples look like, her pussy, at the beach, in the sun. 

“it would be quick too,”

She probably has family, a kid, a husband - definitely a husband; then she smiles, as they walk down the street together, happy to be alive. 

“only cockroaches and some bacteria would survive, depending on their distance from the blast.”

Can she tell what I’m thinking, does she know? probably. Beauty is always aware of itself. 

“MR GREAVES, the doctor will see you now.”

“Blow it all to Hell.”

 

 

 

 

 

Tom Stuckey is a poet from Devon, England.