Denzel was an Eastern European woman. She was middle aged, but she didn’t know it. She believed that she was old at a subconscious level, so that her body took upon itself to stoop and shudder and shy away – for our bodies hear everything we think, I’ve heard it said.
Denzel, dressed in a hoodie, was hunched over a fortune cookie at Wak Nak Dom’s Korean Refinery when the first whiffs of fate made their way through the sweet and sour sauce that dribbled lusciously from her chin. She sniffed like a mole – furtive at first – and then cracked open the cookie. Inside, she saw the hideously cheerful dinosaur face of the beloved children’s character Flopsy staring back at her.
“You want murder?” asked the waitress in stuttering English.
“I…” Denzel’s mole mouth groped for words.
“Make you young again!” laughed the waitress, laying a steak knife on the table.
Denzel stopped sharply. The blade gleamed.
Outside, taxis melted into taxis as the Brooklyn skyline rose higher and higher above her, the giant billboards of Flopsy looming through the city lights.
***
Wak Nak Dom watched the Eastern European woman shuffling the sweet and sour pork onto her chopsticks. While he watched her his hands sliced shrimp automatically so that the carcasses piled up at an alarming rate.
“Her aura is gigantic,” thought Wak Nak Dom, squinting through his frog eyes.
He threw his cleaver into the wall where it lodged with a satisfying clunk and ran to his chest of fortune cookies. He dug and dug excitedly, crushing precious cookies uncaring, until he pulled the super cookie from its hiding place under last year’s menu.
“Flopsy you stupid motherfucker.” Wak Nak Dom murmured under his breath, throwing the fortune cookie across the restaurant so that it landed perfectly on the waitress’s tray as she went to give Denzel her bill.
Wak Nak Dom watched with glee as she opened his super cookie, watched the energy of the lay lines coalesce invisibly above her like melting stars, watched fate start fiddling with its inscrutable fingers along her timeline, and thought with a grin:
“Today is a good day to go dinosaur hunting.”
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