I was parked facing Shorter Avenue, sipping from a Styrofoam cup of bad coffee and watching an Astro minivan get towed. That was when I heard a loud grinding sound—kind of like the sound of a millstone in action—and checked my rearview. I couldn’t comprehend what I was seeing: the Waffle House looked like it was being lifted off its foundation. I got out of my truck, and it was true. There was no crane, nothing. The Waffle House was just floating up into the sky, like an enormous, Waffle House-shaped balloon. Broken pipes were spraying the parking lot with water and human excrement and I sprinted through it toward the front entrance.
I clawed open the glass door and pulled myself up before it was out of reach. I was owed an Alpine Skillet I’d ordered To-Go. I was supposed to be roofing in the unforgiving summer heat and I wasn’t doing it on an empty stomach.
Once I’d gotten to my feet, I flexed my biceps and kissed them like Hulk Hogan. I was still proud of them, even at my age. They’d been good to me.
There were some other customers seated at the counter, enjoying their breakfasts like nothing out of the ordinary was going on. They didn’t pay me any attention as I approached, which was fine by me. I studied the big jar of complimentary Mount Olive pickles beside the cash register—that’s how hungry I was. But I wasn’t going to unscrew the lid and plunge my hand where other unwashed hands had gone before.
“Wilma!” I shouted at the order window. None of the waitresses were out.
One of the regulars, Joe, whose head looked like a giant marshmallow in a trucker cap, looked over at me and raised his bushy eyebrows.
“Jesus, Max,” he exclaimed. “What’re you hollering about?”
“They owe me an Alpine Skillet,” I told him.
“Just calm the fuck down,” he said nonchalantly, which really irritated me. “You got somewhere to be?”
He used his elbow to nudge a guy seated beside him. They both hee-hawed.
Before I could say something, the cook, Bobby, appeared in his white paper hat. Framed by the chrome order window, he looked like an Edward Hopper oil painting of existential despair. Before I dropped out and got my GED, I’d taken an art history class over at Armuchee High.
“You need something?” the cook asked. “Wilma’s taking a shit.”
“Thanks for the update,” I told him. I looked out the front windows. We were going higher and higher and I watched the narrow pine trees retract like mechanical pencil lead.
“What’re we going to do?” I asked nobody in particular.
”Should’ve thought about that before you rushed back in here,” Joe said. I glared at him, but he didn’t care. He leaned over his breakfast platter and forked a slice of ham into his mouth.
Before long, we were so high up I thought the windows might explode, since the interior wasn’t pressurized the way an airplane cabin is. Nobody else at the counter seemed worried. Our plates were empty and we were all nursing mugs of black coffee. There was nothing else to do, since there was no power source, other than the sun outside. I needed to use the bathroom, especially in the wake of my Alpine Skillet, but I didn’t want to flush and rain shit on whatever crowd had gathered below. I figured we were probably the talk of the town by now.
“We’re all going to suffocate if we get much higher,” a guy at the other end of the counter said. The rest of us leaned forward to get a look at him. He didn’t look familiar.
“This guy,” Joe said, motioning with his thumb toward the stranger. “This guy.”
I rolled my eyes, even though I knew the guy was right. But what were we supposed to do? I offered up a silent, sloppy prayer.
Then I did what any other warm-blooded American guy would’ve done: I scanned the restaurant for someone to join the mile-high club with, before it was too late. None of the waitresses were young, and neither were the clientele. That was fine with me—I like older women.
“Wilma!” I shouted at the order window again, my hands cupped around my mouth like Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire. She was my Stella, now.
To my surprise, she strolled out of the back kitchen. She leaned down and rested her elbow on the counter in front of me. She cradled her chin in her hand.
“What do you want, Max?” she asked, smirking. She was gnawing on a stick of wintergreen gum, in an attempt to disguise the smell of Virginia Slims on her breath.
I was about to make my case for her affection, but she raised one finger and placed it on my lips to save me the trouble.
“Hold on,” she said. “Let me guess. You’re lonely, right? You think we’re all going to die up here. And all you want is some sweet loving before you go to that great big Home Depot in the sky,” she said. “Is that about right, Cowboy?”
She drew her finger away and I nodded.
“Yeah,” I admitted.
“No way, Hosea,” she said. “I’ve got a man, now. A good man,” she told me. “A good man’s hard to find. And, anyway, I’ve got the clap—courtesy of the aforementioned.”
“Alright,” I said, defeated. I was in a losing battle.
Still, I might not have given up on Wilma. But before I could try again, I heard the chop of propellers behind me. We all looked. It was a BH-47, tandem-rotor helicopter—the type of helicopter we used in Vietnam for evacuating troops. It floated outside the windows like a giant cockroach.
“What is this? Black Hawk Down?” Joe asked, but nobody laughed at his joke. “Fuck me.”
The rear loading ramp lowered and a soldier appeared there with a megaphone. He explained the urgency of the situation. He assured us we were going to be rescued. The plan involved suspending soldiers from cables so they could carry us to the safety of the cargo bay.
“You’ll want to hold on tight,” he said.
I realized I would probably still have to roof the rest of the afternoon. I wasn’t sure what was worse: suffocation or mindless labor. At that moment, it wasn’t an easy decision. Not when everything seemed simple and all my needs were being met—most of them, at least.
“Sorry, Cowboy,” Wilma whispered into my ear.
I turned to look at her. She wasn’t one of the great beauties—not by a mile—but she made me think of one of Leonardo da Vinci’s women then, her skin warm with sunlight.
“There’s always tomorrow,” I told her, but I think she heard the sadness in my voice.
When I look back on the whole experience, the worst part was escaping the world just long enough to not miss it and then being brought back to reality. That might be the worst thing any human can go through: going from earth to heaven and then back again. And we do it every day.
Zack Strait lives with his wife and son in Georgia. His poems have appeared in POETRY, Ploughshares, and The Common, among other journals.