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Half a dozen men have straggled from dawn's cold drizzle into the squat white restaurant beneath the sign, three graveyard workers from North Pacific Lumber, a couple of salesmen fueling up for drives to Walla Walla and Klamath Falls, a drunk who thinks his hangover will throb less if he forces down food before stumbling back to the trailer park.

One waitress handles the counter, another takes orders at tables. It's Helen at the counter, she's forty and fat, bleached blonde, dugs hung like bread dough from wide shoulders. And Heidi at the tables, she's twenty-two and red-haired, tiny pink-tipped breasts barely breaking the freckled skin over her ribs. Helen has married and divorced three times, is not easily amused. Heidi's husband pumps gas at Lee Texaco, starts work at noon after she finishes the breakfast shift and goes home to care for their daughters, ages four and three.

The lumber workers talk quietly in a booth, eat bacon and scrambled eggs, steal glances at Helen and Heidi. The drunk slouches on a red leatherette counter stool, squeezes his forehead, stares into a thick white mug of oily coffee. The salesmen sit at separate tables, calculate mileage, commissions. Helen jams four pieces of bread into the toaster, uses a paper napkin to wipe a speck of margarine from her left breast. Heidi shivers, wishes she could grab her blue blouse from its hook in the kitchen. She doesn't mind if millhands check out her naked chest, but she is so damn cold.

By Don Snell

Fall 2007

Real

It's been a month since she dumped me and I'm still sleeping on my brother's couch. (I just don't like spending nights alone, you know?) It's Sunday -- Monday morning, really, 1 a.m. -- when she knocks. I pull on jeans, stumble to the door. There she stands, blonde and blue-eyed, lovely as the night she told me she was checking into a coast motel with the guy from the next desk.

"I spent the weekend at his place," she says, "and I needed to see you. When I'm with him, I sometimes feel like I'm not real."

I yank a shirt on and we drive across town to my apartment, where we split the last Budweiser as she tells me he listens to stereo "Rigoletto," he bought her a biography of William O. Douglas, he talks constantly of climbing their shared corporation. He has two kids. His ex-wife kept the girl, who is five. The boy is seven. He went to the coast with them. (Did the boy sleep in the next bed while they made love? Or do you rent a separate motel room for a seven-year-old so you can have privacy for sex? She didn't say.) He grew up in Yakima. He's thirty-one, had a vasectomy, wears a lapel pin advertising it. Sometimes she doesn't know what to say to him, so she just stares out the window.

"Could we go to bed?" she asks. "Could we go to bed and you just hold me?"

We go to bed. I hold her. After a while, she sleeps. She awakes at five-thirty, goes home to shower for work. She says she'll call. She doesn't.

I guess she got real.

Bio:

David Jordan, who lives in Bend, OR, is a former newspaperman and teacher turned fictionwriter/poet. He has published poems and stories in more than eighty literary journals, including Nimrod, Rattle, Comstock Review, Thema, Long Shot and Ballyhoo Stories. His work appears online in such e-magazines as Zygote in My Coffee, Opium, Word Riot, Thieves Jargon, The Circle, The Green Tricycle, The Dead Mule, Spillway Review and The Fossil Record.

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