Eating tiny little cakes...

Meditations on K.R. #6 | prose poetry

Jan 31, 2022

Eating tiny little cakes that taste like strawberries from another dimension. I imagine that I’m dining with Keanu Reeves. We watch the last 10 minutes of Wheel of Fortune on the restaurant big screen.

“...olden ...eets...golden...GOLDEN BEETS.”

Hmm. A good one.

“Yes, that’s a good one,” notes Keanu.

I bring a huge mouthful of banana pudding to my open face and ask Keanu to tell me about the time he met Dolly Parton. (They’re both purported to be lovely, courteous folks, and I wondered what one would say of the other.) But Keanu was quiet and smiled. I smiled back; I knew why he couldn’t tell me. It was okay.

I never eat banana pudding. Only at Chinese buffets. Although, I usually do tapioca, but this buffet has only banana. With banana slices mixed in. With whip cream and vanilla wafer cookies.

I’ve always preferred desserts with the very dimmest of sweet, and the Chinese buffets do it so well; tapioca, palmas, fried biscuit dough, sesame balls filled with red bean paste.

An expose on pregnancy issues pops up on the big screen. We find it unsettling. Keanu shifts in his seat and looks at his noodles. I distract myself with guilt over asking him to eat here. Surely he’s had exquisite Chinese food. In China. Oh yeah, that’s right, he’s learned to speak a little Cantonese for movies. What am I doing. What is he doing here?

Then he hooked his eyes on my face, and took an absurd amount of noodles into his mouth.

“I love this place,” he grummuffled through fried egg and translucent strands.

I laughed out loud. A gentleman to the core.

“I quit my job today,” I said, smiling.

“Yep,” he said, cheek distended. “You totally did.”

kmC. June 19, 2019. 7:05 PM

Eating tiny little cakes...

Meditations on K.R. #6 | prose poetry

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