"Do you want a refill on that coffee, sweetheart?"
A darting glance at my waitress's name-tag revealed her to be a haggard and middle-aged Doris. A quick look at her face extolled morbid volumes about where she was going in life and where she'd been already, which didn't appear to be up in either direction. A voice like Marge's sister Selma from the Simpsons and the hearty reek of cigarettes wafting off her uniform suggested a heavy smoker as she punctuated her perfunctory generosity with a racking phlegmatic cough.
"Oh no thanks. Um, I'm fine... Thank you."
Clearly Doris's cue to perform the duties of her post had been inspired somewhat mechanically by the span of time since the coffee arrived, and not the absence of it from my cup, which was still completely full, icy, dark, and lifeless. I didn't even drink coffee. I don't know why I'd orderred it almost an hour ago now.
"So I guess you'll be wanting the check", she croaked, resenting in some inperceptable way the state laws preventing her from deliverring this line with a half-spent Camel dangling loosely from her unconvincingly vibrant lips.
I affected a wan smile for no good reason and made a half-assed attempt at humor.
"Not especially. Could you keep it for me, maybe?"
"No, sweetheart. I can't do that." Doris clapped the bill to the table and plodded heavily off towards her station between kitchen and clientelle like a cartoon inmate dragging an iron ball.
For my part, my gaze returned to the oily surface of the beverage in question and my thoughts tumbled back into darkness.
Maybe that's why I'd bought the damn thing in the first place: to give memory visual reinforcement as I pitched retrospectively into the slowing, cooling ripples of my life once flush with passionate aspirations now still.