It is here, the first day of December. I don’t know if it will fly by as fast as November did. Part of me hopes it will so we can get started shaking the dust of this year off. The rest of me knows what my schedule looks like for the month and wants a few extra days to complete the end of the year tasks. Either way the month will be what it will be. I’m hoping for quiet. But today we step into the month with our first December writing prompt. Are you ready? Good, then let’s go.
I like the thought of someone sneaking out to illicitly consume hash browns and eggs I don’t know why that tickles me but it does. I like the character and think she might be a good secondary character in a story I am working on actually. Or perhaps she will star in her own tale, who knows.
Thursday, December 1st: The hash browns were crispy around the edges.
The hash browns were crispy around the edges. It was just the way she liked them. As always she wondered why every diner she had ever been in managed to get them just right when she could never make them correctly at home.
‘Must be the flat top,’ she thought as she opened the ketchup bottle and added a dab of it to the side of her plate. While she was certain the flat top grill in the diner kitchen played a role, Maria was certain that the decades of use for steaks, hamburgers, bacon and other assorted foods also made the hash browns here better.
In the name of cholesterol though, she was willing to tell herself it was just the equipment and not her own lack of saturated fats that let the diner do a better job than she could at home.
‘Besides, it isn’t as though I have them often,’ she reminded herself.
The diner was her private indulgence and always had been. Her order was always the same. Two eggs over easy, two strips of bacon, hash browns and coffee. The order wasn’t a spectacular one and she was certain it wasn’t memorable to any of the staff, but to her, it felt decadent.
Growing up her Barents advocated whole wheat toast with a light scraping of margarine as an appropriate breakfast. The margarine was in truth scraped so thin that it was really a mere suggestion than an actual smear. The toast was washed down with a protein shake and a host of vitamins to keep everyone strong and healthy.
She discovered the diner in her first year of college and fell in love with the egg. Drinking and drugs never appealed to her, but those eggs with the golden runny yolk were her private addiction. One she never told anyone about and only occasionally indulged in. Later when she married, she married someone who’s career let them hire in kitchen help and dine out at only the fanciest of restaurants, often with the fanciest of people. Carl never saw the point in dining out if you couldn’t have the best. The best was, in his mind, the most expensive, the most exclusive and of course the place where people could see you indulging in the finest the city had to offer.
Diners never even made it to his list.
Of course he was health conscious as well and lived in fear of gaining a single ounce. His diet wasn’t as ruthlessly strict as her parents had been although he took nearly as many vitamins and supplements as they did and his naturally high cholesterol level likewise banned eggs from the table. Breakfast for him was a green smoothie that looked and smelled almost as bad as it actually tasted. She made do with a vanilla flavored protein shake.
In the end it hadn’t mattered and Carl had been taken out by a heart attack while golfing with his friends. While there were many things she still missed about Karl, the food wasn’t one of them.
Ten til Midnight 