A Most Spectacular Rift

Chapter 9

Enzo stabbed the meaty sausage with his fork, all the good oils and fat oozing out onto the wooden bowl.

"It's good you know, their new sausage. I think they put a little less meat than before, but it's still good."

Huncho raised his chin which was inundated with grease. He ate voraciously like a pig, but didn't mind anything about it. He cared about the food, not the decorum that acted as the premise to a fine dining. Plus, he didn't have the money to walk into an expensive restaurant, wipe a frivolous handkerchief on his mouth to blanch it, then eat small portions, all cut up and served with utensils, and primly place chopsticks betwixt forefinger and smaller digits.

Unlike some people trammelled by convention but with pious vanity the suiting of assimilation, Huncho didn't spend a dime on what other people thought of him.

Here, he ate with his hands and the sausages tasted good. That's all that mattered.

Enzo licked each one of his fingers. "How was work today?" He asked in his brute voice.

Huncho took a second to take in all the buzz and everything. A few lanterns lit the restaurant. A brasserie it was, with waitresses hulling mugs of beer that frothed to the brim, a brindy texture. Men sat coated next to chairs that floated to their neck, the back like wide strings of a zither, and creaked and groaned as men slid out of their seats to pay or talk to another, immerse and embroil in the hurlyburly of a crapulous bar. Prattle, repartee, taut lines of sound that flew out the windows that siphoned in a fresh wind.

"You know," Enzo said, licking at his fingers again. "One time I lost some people too, a lot of them actually."

Huncho almost didn't hear his sound as the sea of voices drowned him out almost.

"You weren't in the war though. You said you weren't a soldier. I don't know why you couldn't be, you exceed all the body types of specs."

Enzo shook his head. He looked beyond Huncho, thoughts at wharf, and rudimentary word not carried out of lorry by his mouth.

"Huncho, what do you want to do with your life?"

Huncho looked up. He hadn't thought about that.

"Huncho," Enzo continued. "Do you want to apprentice to a master, go to one of the universities, do menial tasks and live a care-free life, get conscripted off to war, be a merchant sailor, visit all the great cities of Rorania, see the high-rising needles. Or do you want to stay here?"

It was such an influx of information that Huncho stopped eating his sausage. Enzo must have had a reason for asking all of this. He really did care about Huncho's future.

A sharp creak sounded behind him, someone got off his seat, and stumbled, intoxicated, outside.

Huncho shook his head. "I don't know. Maybe -"

The brouhaha amplified.

Huncho turned his head. "Maybe I -"

"Gentlemen, listen up! I only need two tenths of your drunk minds and a likewise minute to talk about something!"

The throng of men sitting down, most buff, cumbersome, girth wider than their pants, florid faces, some with prognathous jaws and long lanky necks, others with square faces and bushy beards, but they all did not like the man up front, a stout man in a velvet robe, a quizzical expression borne on his countenance, and flourishing an ebonwood cane, and so the crowd made sure to express vitriol.

"Hey, we're eating!"

Like pigs, true pigs, Huncho thought.

Fists hammered to tables. Mugs raised up in exuberance and protest.