The Night of Slender Surrender

"Cherry pie, butter cup?"

"No I'll have the apple on the platter."

"But this damn cherry pie sure is delicious."

"Sorry, but I don't take things that are spelled wrong on menu." He pointed to the cheery pie on the menu.

"Oh hot fudge, that's so embarrassing! Here, I'll take that and just get you somethin' good."

"Thanks ma'am."

Stock pretended to be busy looking into life as he was left alone at the diner counter on a stool. He really could've been interpreting the meaning of life, everything he thought of was related to it, but really life was like a bar a soap. Slippery and never leaving your skin, but keeping you clean from time to time. Trying to pick it up off the ground was harmful to the world.

But life to Stock couldn't be more interesting. Stock did all kinds of things. Too much to talk about. He wanted to think about seeing some apple and not cheery pie coming next.
Oh, what a cheery pie could have turned out to be.

Off behind a slicked shiny metal door, a tiny ring or a ding came through. Probably the sign of food somewhere.

That girl came back round to a booth with seven people with varied ages. Other than that, the dusty diner was dry of customers in and outside.

The seven people were being almost rowdy. Loud enough to listen to their highly educated and opinionated conversations, but not too loud that the chatter could be considered a freakish annoyance. They were moving all around their crowded booth, slightly out of the booth, but not falling on the floor. The waitress was doing her best.

The waitress went back behind the scenes and came out to Stock with a small plate. He almost expected cheery pie on the hunk of plate. Instead, a brown muffin laid on it. Stump and all.

"This is that somethin' good, darling."

Stock looked at it and then back to the waitress. He looked at it again and then closed his mouth and said thanks ma'am.

Rejection radiated from this town like it was tested for nuclear damage.

His whole hand wrapped around the coffee and he tipped it back like it was an oasis in the desert.

Today he was needed to round up some cows and hold them together in the group so that the rancher could count 'em all, number by number, and then pin 'em up. The rancher told Stock there were fifty-seven cows. It was going to take from the daylight to the starlight, and Stock was sitting in the diner without a concern.

He noticed that the roots of sundown started coming through and decided it was probably time to get back.

Leaving the penny tip with a pile of half the muffin still on the plate but in the currency of crumbs, Stock set out the door and down some rickety old wooden bars heading to his horse.

Lucky was a young thing, and she had never seen cows up close until the man people called Stock took her off the reins gently during the intermission of a race. She didn't mind Stock too much, he gave her food every now and then when he greeted her coming out of a door. This was one of those times when he came out of a door and didn't come to her mouth with a thing to eat. He just rubbed her nose a bit and trailed his hand across her back and hopped on, taking rein.

"Back to the grind," he sighed.

He always appeared lonely to the world. He wore just a battered, black, faded t-shirt with a hole on the seam at the arm, a hole near the collar, a hole in the very center of his back where his collar bones met, and frayed threads all over the edges. He had a sturdy leather belt that managed to hold the knee-holed, faded, blue jeans to his hips. His boots were worn just like everything else and his hat was sun-bleached to a pale tan. Here, he matched his surroundings.

Turning round Lucky, he chided her so that they were at a smooth pace along the edge of the road, paying no mind to the cars that avoided them by five feet into the dirt on the other side of them.

A mile or two down, they went right onto the path to the ranch and went a ways until they stopped near the cows and a frantic rancher.

"You! Where have you been?!" he ran through the cow maze.

"I had a uh, light and dry dinner. Which one's next, John?"

John was the name. John was someone who needed a name, someone who had a name but then didn't, and someone who was actually known to Stock as John.

"Which one's next?!r I only got three while you were gone for-" he peeked at his wristwatch, "-a whole hour! I've been on twenty-seven for thirty minutes now!"

He tried to say something else, but Stock's voice was overpowering his. "I see 'im over there behind mister forty-three, that bastard." Forty-three had been a bit bigger than the others and more social so that whenever he moved to moo at another cow he managed to hide the next in order.