My last meal in
I was eating the last of my fries and drinking a Dr. Pepper when a woman with an African accent asked if she could sit down at my table. It was crowded and there weren’t many seats left. I said she could. She sat down across from me.
“Do you mind doing me a favor, please?” she asked once she had taken a seat.
“Sure,” I said. “What is it?”
“Do you mind opening my ketchup packets?” she asked. “I’d do it myself, but I don’t have any thumbs.”
She held up her hands to show me, as if somebody would really lie about something like that. Her skin was old and wrinkled, leathery and ashy. Scar tissue covered the sockets where her thumbs used to be.
“Normally I carry my scissors around with me,” she explained. “But, you know, security these days.” She laughed out loud at her own joke.
She liked ketchup a lot, and I must have opened at least thirty packets for her.
“Oh, that’s not nearly enough ketchup,” she kept telling me as she kept getting up to go to the condiment stand. “Just a couple of more packets should do.”
She went back to the stand two or three times before I’d opened enough ketchup for her. The puddle must have taken up half the tray.
I like ketchup, too, but probably not nearly as much as her. 76,789 out of 100,000.
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