Dinner

          When the waiter brought a plate of hair to the table alongside Beth's soup, it was difficult to be polite about it. Still, Beth felt the need to be polite, because it was a nice restaurant, and she was on a date for the first time in months, and with a guy she actually liked. His name was Dave and he smelled like shaving cream and the subway.

          From the way Dave looked first at the plate of hair and then at her, Beth couldn't be sure if he had ordered it for her, as a surprise, while she was in the bathroom. He had been talking earlier about the exotic locations he had visited in the previous year – Bali, Peru, some place near Madagascar – and she assumed that interesting foods and customs were a part of those voyages. Dave had a disarming smile and an easy way with words that had made the night go quickly until that moment.

          Beth dipped her spoon into the soup, a tomato-cream bisque that she had ordered with a sidelong glance at Dave, hoping he wouldn't think her uncultured for skipping over the more adventurous carrot ginger gazpacho. Dave had ordered a salad, which had not yet arrived, giving him time to focus his gaze on her. She put her spoon down.

          "Please," Dave said. "Eat. Don't wait for me."

          "Would you like to try anything?" Beth said. She hoped Dave would go for the hair, which lay clumped on its plate directly between them. In fact, it wouldn't be entirely clear that the plate of hair was meant for her, except that the waiter had bowed at her when delivering the dishes, and had murmured to her his wishes that she enjoy her meal, despite, she assumed, the fact that her entree of squab would be arriving later. Beth wondered for a thrilling moment if squab was not actually a small bird, as she had figured, but a plate of hair.

          "Do try something," she said, hopefully.

          Dave shook his head. He was still smiling, but his gaze had dropped to her lips, meaning either that he wanted to kiss her (she had read about this technique in magazines), or that he wanted her to eat already, to take a healthy chunk of hair (with what, her fork?) and choke it down with a swallow of red wine, the clogged mass moving down her throat like an obstruction through the pipes of a bathtub.

          Beth couldn't take her eyes away from the plate of hair. The soup fell into the background, harboring her forgotten spoon. It was dark hair, maybe black, and piled up with a volume that made it seem as if the chef had snipped off a massive tangle and laid it there without presentation.

          "Would you like to leave?" Dave asked.

          It was like he had pulled the thought from her mind, but when she looked at him, she knew it was not a sincere proposal. He had pulled some strings for their reservation, after all, getting the two of them a table at the last moment, no doubt at some expense to his professional standing. Men didn't enjoy asking for things, Beth knew from the magazines.

          She shook her head at him cheerily, too quickly. She would have to eat the hair, she knew – that or ruin the date, and everything that went along with it. He was watching. He knew it, too.

Amelia Gray lives and works in Austin, TX. Her fiction is published or forthcoming in McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Keyhole Magazine, Caketrain, Swivel, Guernica, Bound Off, and Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens, among others. She was a recent finalist in the DIAGRAM Innovative Fiction Contest, the Redivider Quickie Contest, and the Rose Metal Press Chapbook Contest.