“Ma'am?” I wheeze drearily.  My eyes are still crusty from waking.  “Miss?”

	The waitress behind the counter looks past me.  Her eyes are lopsided—just like her nametag and half as greasy.  A delivery truck's diesel engine rattles the windows as it chugs past the diner outsider.  I watch as the lady twirls like a drunken ballerina—apron flailing—and lands with gymnastic grace at the patron stool furthest from me.  She pours something black into a business ogre's cup, and the liquid grows blacker as the dreary morning lurches on by.

	My eyes wander to the clock above the kitchen.  Through thick steam, I see the big hand on seven and the small hand on twelve.

	“Madame?” I try again.  I consider wadding up a myriad of Central American languages and tossing them her way, but I'm certain they'd just fall short and become food for the cockroaches on the tile floor.  Spoons clatter against saucers and the smell of bacon smegma molests my nostrils.  “My egg muffin sandwich...?”  I leave the sentence unfinished.  Just like my career.

	There's a flutter to her steps.  Slippers clack-a-clack against linoleum.  She flutters past me.  Lilac and brimstone.  My stomach grumbles.

	“Can you fucking believe it?” mutters some grease monkey seated to my left.  “He's picked a bastard named 'Jewstein' as his running mate.  Jewstein.”  Smiling teeth.  Urine yellow.  The newspaper crinkles in his paws like a used diaper.  “Good luck passing that shit off as Protestant!”

	I sniff.

	“I hear the democrats' nominee raped a boy when he was at Harvard,” grumbles some uptown fop in a bowtie.  He squirms atop the stool to my right.  “Of course, the liberal media won't let that see the light of day.”

	My fingernails need trimming.  They dance a tango around the brown counter stains in front of me.  I have thirty tax files stacked up from last night.  The company can't afford to give me more hours to do my work, and yet they threaten to take my job due to all the backlog.  The street behind us roars with garbage trucks, and I can feel the stones in my bladder bunching up.

	My eyes scrape the ceiling.  Halfway there, they find the clock.  Through the haze, I see the big hand on the seven and the small hand on the twelve.

	“Ma'am, I'm sorry if you're having a bad shift,” I mutter.  I feel like rolling sideways.  Paralyzed kittens don't live very long.  My mind wanders to a bloody nose I suffered at my elementary school playground.  “But if I don't get my breakfast and punch the clock on time, my boss will have my prostate—and not in the good way.”

	I'm certain she heard me this time.  The kitchen bell rings.  Her hairbun rises and falls with the volcanic ash while her body undulates.  Somewhere, I hear screeching, and she cartwheels across the diner to deliver a stack of pancakes to two dinosauric blue collar grungeheaps in overalls.  My stomach sobs into itself, twisting like satin lingerie.

	“It's the Illuminati, I tell you,” Fop says, wriggling his but deeper around the hard stool.  “I read it in a book somewhere.  They've got Manhattan's banking hierarchy by the scrotum.”

	“Got a red phone to Israel in one of those offices,” sputters the orangutan.  “Everyone of them, deep in their pocket.  Along with the blood of all those Palestinian babies they run over every day.”

	I sigh, bowing to the counter.  I rub my temples, as if hoping to squeeze the voices out.  Like pus.  Despite my efforts, the screaming only intensifies.

	“You know,” hums a musical voice.  I see jagged teeth reflected in a salt-saker.  Smiling.  There are no eyes beneath his hat.  “They say that Hell is something as simple as a Monday morning that never ends.”

	Taxis wail against the tumult.  The skyscrapers groan under the weight of bone and mucus.  I look up to the clock.  Beyond the fumes, it reads seven o'clock.  I'm behind schedule.

	“Ma'am?  Please?”  I reach for her.  Flakes of skin flutter in the breeze.  Hair and cigarette smoke and locusts.  She streaks past the counter, claws scraping against bedrock.  I start to snarl.  “Okay, look...”