Le Café de nuit.

We who are the tenants of what has become known as the customer service industry are offered a unique perspective of a person's inner workings when viewed from across that countertop. Often it is a seemingly endless repetition of impersonal greetings and instructions, a mechanical algorithm. And there are these rare occasions where a person will instead show a deep honesty. One recent night, a finely dressed middle-aged woman comes in to receive some lattes from our store. She would drift a little to the side as she approached from the door, and when she had, her voice's volume rose and lowered unnaturally. She had the kind of eyes that a bottle of wine will gift a person. And she was exasperated as her husband waited outside, parked in a needlessly large SUV or something of the sort. Perhaps she could have used anything other than what she ordered, so I offered her a small pastry on the side. And, with what I hoped would sound a caressing jest, I said now don't share that with anyone. That treat is all your own. She swayed with her drink tray. Share, she said, as if I had taunted her for a retort--share with him? Twenty-five years with him. Can you even believe it. Her speech slowed so that the last was not even a question. My surprise made our eyes meet again before she turned to leave, and the sincerity in hers gave to me only a steady, defeated look of unfathomable despair.

Somehow dreadfully cracked about the head.

One of those captcha boxes today said 'halmersi' to me. And I know this sounds a logical stretch but, well, you know. So I started thinking about what those letters say when you sound them out, and how the phrase 'have mercy', all anxiously shouted upwards, seems to have so much more meaning when radically slurred. A refined language loses the deepest levels of meaning. Fanon, Bhabha, Melville, Rimbaud, and on. Have mercy.