Faker (If I Have Not Already Told You)

Giles sits and watches the pasty-face eat his sandwich. Giles lets his tongue loll out of his mouth and a little bit of spit marks his chin. When he coughs, he coughs hearty, and a little chunk breaks loose. He looks down. He looks down. Down is where his heart is, but he doesn't know where else to put it.

The pasty-face makes a wiping motion, unaware that Giles is watching. Mayonnaise, quite likely, thinks Giles. It is always the mayonnaise, because that one man realized that mayonnaise is good for your beard, and now everyone eats the mayonnaise. I have to sit here and just look down. Just look down.

Small ruby girl walks past from one side to the other – she is working, she is earning her keep, as Giles says. Small ruby girl has that ruby in her nose and Giles likes to watch it as she talks. He lets his tongue loll out of his mouth and a little bit of spit marks his chin. Ruby girl looks up and sees Giles and his pink, fleshy tongue and his shiny spit on his chin and she says “gross” to herself and says nothing aloud, but walks on back to the other side, away from Giles.

Giles presses his fist into his pants. Makes a ball of a fist and presses it hard. That makes him look like a man, and when the ruby girl comes back she will see him balling up his fist and pressing it into his pants. That is good, Giles thinks. Hell, he doesn't think, he knows it. Press it hard and the ruby girl will think you have it all. When she comes back, that is. When she comes back, and you press it hard – press it hard because you need to press it hard.

The pasty-face wraps up the last bits of his sandwich. He wraps them in the waxed paper that held the sandwich before he bought it. He wraps it up tightly, sets it aside, right on top of a dirty tray and an empty paper cup and some balled-up napkins that could have wiped a shiny smear of spit on someone's chin but didn't. Shiny smear. The pasty-face wraps it up nice and tight. The pasty-face walks away, in the opposite direction of the ruby-girl.

Giles slinks over to where the pasty-face sat. He reaches for the balled-up wrapper and opens it up. The sandwich bit is dry, but Giles is in luck, because the mayonnaise is good for his beard.