THE MAN WITH THE BROKEN FACE The man with the broken face came to me. He held a plate, simple blue-patterned bone china, with immaculately made eggs Florentine. The man, the man with the broken face, he tried to smile to no avail. A razorblade tongue darted out from equally sharp and crooked teeth to lick thin pale lips. His eyes had a spiteful jealousy in them as he watched me light a cigarette. He sat down next to me, and with a carefully polite and deliberate motion, asked for one. I fished one out of my pack and gingerly handed it to him. He held it like a baby as he suspiciously eyed it. He then motioned for a light, which I gave him with a half-kind smile one would reserve for a pet or a child or a cripple. We smoked in relative silence as time seemingly passed with an unbearable thickness and his food grew cold. He stubbed out his cigarette shortly after me in the glass ashtray between us. The man, the man with the broken face, then began to crudely shovel his cold breakfast into his mouth as I offered up a silent thankful prayer that he did not order oatmeal. When he was done the man stood up and found his wallet in his back pants pocket. He rummaged through it angrily and found a crumpled faded ten dollar bill. He threw it down contemptuously at the manicured countertop. He tried to smile again as I tried not to cry. As the man, the man with the broken face, walked out of the diner and threw himself into traffic like he thrown down the dollar bill, I think he thought I was some kind of angel. TIMELESSNESS They say cold hands, warm heart. They've never felt her cold hands wrapped vice-tight around my neck. They don't wake up from blacking out with a morphine pump installed in that artery in your leg. I'm no doctor, but that and the Viagra she says she's been slipping me can't be healthy. I haven't seen her cat for days, and that's started to worry me to. She keeps me handcuffed to the bed. She tells me, in my drug hazes, that the dining room table just wouldn't be acceptable for this kind of thing. She has to eat off of it for fuck's sake, she tells me. Every so often I tell her, slurred and numb-tongued, that I have to go to the bathroom. She tells me the bags I can't see are for a reason. She starts to leave me presents. First, a bedside table: shiny steel with a swivel tray top. Then: a hermetically sealed pack. Then: an IV. Every time I hear a toilet flush, I worry about the cat. She checks the morphine pump and tells me it's Christmas. She tells me my present for her is to make her a lot of money on the back market. She might have said black market. She says my present is not having to grow old. I've never wanted to grow old.