by Graham Towers
She was sitting in the cafeteria alone, reading a book and eating breakfast. I put my tray on the table and sat across from her.
“ ‘Sup, fool?”
she asked.
“Not much.” I started peeling my orange. “That’s an incredibly green banana you’ve got there.”
“Yeah, I’m going to take it to my room and eat it when it gets ripe.”
“Kierkegaard would call that foolish because you might be dead by then.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Well, yeah, but probably not.”
“You never know. Aren’t you giving blood tomorrow?”
“Yeah.”
“They could put the tube in wrong and give you an embolism; it hits your brain and explodes gray matter all over the pretty nurses. What would become of your banana?”
“My roommate Nicole would probably eat it?”
She did the thing she does where she makes statements into questions by raising the pitch of her voice uncertainly at the end.
“Really? She would eat the piece of fruit that her freshly-dead roommate had been planning to eat? That’s one morbid banana.”
She smiled. “Morbid Banana sounds like a band name.”
“Yeah, Morbid Banana and the Awkward Fifth.”
“I don’t follow.”
“The Awkward Fifth is something I thought of when I saw this guy drink too much and pass out. I started thinking, ‘What if your friend died of alcohol poisoning, and the last thing he drank out of was an almost-full fifth of Jack Daniel’s’. What do you do with it? You obviously can’t drink it, but you would be a fool to throw it away. It’s the Awkward Fifth.”
“Morbid Banana and the Awkward Fifth. I like it.” She picked up her tray to return it. “You know, this is first time I’ve ever eaten breakfast where somebody has talked about Kierkegaard, embolisms, and alcohol-related fatalities. Congratulations.”
After she left, I noticed the banana still sitting on the table.
That was indeed a good breakfast.