[Askoga]: 89.Short Stories.Impressions

She hunched over her plate, eating hungrily. The way that she ate, one might expect her food to spray out of her mouth as fast as it is going in. Her tongue poked out of her mouth between chews, sometimes with bits of food on it, and often multiple times before she’d chew again. It was amazing to me that she managed to keep the table before her quite clean. When she drank, it was as though she expected it to spill over her front, so she was very careful, and she hovered over her food, as though someone might steal it. Before she’d start eating again, she’d stick her tongue out of her mouth several more times, scraping her teeth over it as though there was something stuck on it. She reminded me at those times of a dog eating peanut-butter. Then she caught me watching her, and she smiled, revealing her two front teeth, and a sea of bare, pink gums on either side of them. I smiled back and left off watching her strange method of eating to look around the rest of the dark room.

Most of the others were eating, also. The hunchbacked woman nearest me, whose style of eating I’ve just described, was the most interesting, but there were others. Some younger men in fatigues, just across the room, were amusing their female friends by making music of sorts on the glasses. They wet their fingertips and ran them around the edge of a wineglass, and after a few seconds the glass would make an ear-piercing, ringing whine. The young men, I believe they were in their early twenties, experimented with various levels of wine in their glasses, getting different pitches of whines. This seemed to bother the people nearest them as much as it did me, but there was little place for them to move, as the room was rather packed.

In another area, there were some older men in uniforms. All of them had rank, though the only one whose rank I saw clearly was a sergeant. There was a woman in this group, also, though she was wearing a uniform as well. They were laughing and drinking, but not with the abandon of the younger men. From what I could gather of their conversation, and their uniforms, they appeared to be in the air force. They did seem to know the younger men, though, so I gathered that they were from the same wing.

I shifted around a little and glanced at the hunchbacked woman again. She was back to eating in her most unusual way, poking her tongue out between chews. I gathered that the food was pretty good. It looked as though she had turkey, ham, stuffing, and some sliced potatoes with cheese on them. My own stomach grumbled as I watched her eat again, so I looked away. Christmas Eve, and yet this place was full, and I still without enough to even buy a morsel of food for myself. None to watch out for the stranger on Christmas, for they had to watch out for themselves and their own families. This I understood, and I didn’t resent them for it.