Symbolic Logic

Flash Fiction

She floated down onto the hard maple seat, with an orange stuffed Naugahyde rest behind. The customers barely looked and went back to reading the tabloid and arguing over baseball. It was a herald of how to be an American. It was the way in the Globe Diner. Outside the early morning bustle and inside the smell of coffee.

She looked up at the fat line cook. Though her face was plain, he smiled back at her. Then he asked eagerly: ”The usual today?” His eyes danced as low as they could go, finding whole countries in her folds.

She just nodded in affirmation. A portion of Reuben plopped onto the griddle and rye comments from the cashier.

The line cook only looked another moment at her slender face with wide eyes and then turned his attention to let the over the burgers, rolling the hot dogs, punishing the eggs, and tenderly giving love to the slices before layering over the Swiss cheese. She gave cold breath to this.

Once he looked away, she turned back to the page, working over the equations that had continued to stump her. The intricacies of the topological methods in Galois Representation theory were retrieved and complex especially when the explicit Brauer induction theory made an appearance. We are the core musicians and our bodies are the pitiful instruments. This she thought. Then she turned back to cohomology.

He turned to stack the sandwich for her all the while imagining a fifth of scotch while he squeezed the Charmin. The man sitting next to her felt the line cook’s face was obsequious and obnoxious. The line cook didn’t notice.

And as we panned out through the glass window, we saw the canonical form: of eyes slinking along the smoot form not realizing the complexity of all the dimensions that she holds in her palm wrapped around the pen that without peer shakes and delights.