Eating Out

Triple-layered walls, red yellow blue.
Indiscreet signs, signboard arrows pointing in the wrong direction.
A housefly sails through the air, lands lightly on my empty soup bowl. I smile wistfully for the flies we met in Laos.
At another table, the cleaner stores two pieces of unwanted popiah, his secret supper or perhaps tomorrow's meagre breakfast.
Suddenly I find it hard to swallow.
Mother with her curly fried hair hurries me to hurry for the shops are closing.
Unscrubbed surfaces, grim grubby floors.
A No-Smoking sign. Next to steam rising in quiet defiance from metal trays heavily loaded with food, despite the lateness and deepness of the night.
A lady totters by bravely in her heels, stamping on grit which leave its signature on the underside of her soles.
Broken Chinese New Year songs rattle the atmosphere.
The clanging of kitchen utensils.
The cleaner flings the half-opened tissue packet onto the soiled mass, then realises, without any flickering betrayal of awareness in his ocean-shaped eyes, that it is still usable.
And tosses it back on the table like it has never been dirtied.
It can even be as good as new.
Such is the gritty reality of life, and what do I have to be afraid of.