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Elizabeth Gahbler's avatar

Am smiling about all the mini-stories and layers of complexity within this one short story.

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Shelah Horvitz's avatar

These tight and elegant characterizations take me back to when I was young and I had to drive 20 miles each way to work the counter in a donut shop job that paid only a few dollars a week, how much I needed that job, how the owner was a nasty failed tyrant who set the pattern for almost every boss I had thereafter. How all of us girls in the front got threats we would lose our job if we didn't put out, and that settled down once one did steadily, and how we were all almost friends but you could never trust the one who did put out, her allegiance was to the tyrant. You remind me of the homeless who would come in for soup, how I had been burned by the soup so many times my hands stopped feeling pain, how the manager got rid of the soup to get rid of the homeless. How I could tell what someone was going to order and how they would take their coffee just by looking at them, some people were hard on themselves, some easy, and they ordered dry, sweet or fatty accordingly. All the unfairnesses I saw in life thereafter I saw in that donut shop, all the quiet desperations, and you make me remember. And you make me remember how free it feels when you hit your limit and walk away. Thank you.

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