Irish Canadian, Open

[-OZ-]

Seated in a booth, the young woman was dressed in black jeans and a white tank top, her bare shoulders covered by a satin black jacket. Copper curls fell around her face and shoulders like a fiery main. They shone in the dim light of the restaurant.

So far she had ordered only a sweet tea, the lemon laying discarded and abandoned on a napkin at the edge of the table. The rest of the table was devoured by pamphlets about tourist areas in Canada, places to go, people and shows to see. There was a geography book laying open, Canada: A History laying beneath it propping it up. She was leafing through the geography book, landing the page on an overall map.

Canada's deep, thick forests and rising, jutting mountains were so different from Ireland's rolling hills and crashing waves and long, low, meadows. There the rain kissed the earth in soft, light mists, here the rain came down in crashing buckets, soaking the earth for hours at a time. She didn't miss Ireland with an ache, just a small throb of longing. She missed the friendliness, the closeness of the people, the way they welcomed a stranger with open arms, the way that you could get into someones car on the side of the highway and take away a new friend.

[Grace]

Sadah didn't much like the fifties. Granted, the girl never lived through them, but she had a problem with Social Experiment America. There was nothing wrong, of course, with wanting to have a family, a secure place to live. No, Sadah couldn't abide empowering an entire demographic and then stripping them of any sort of identity but 'slave.'

She was, however, more than willing to overlook Monroe's unashamed hail to such times in favor of their fudge cake. The fudge cake was good enough to die for. Or kill for, if you want to enjoy it later.

The artist, that is, Sadah, had given into her chocolate cravings during her lunch break. It was with resolute purpose that the girl walked into Monroe's fine establishment and made her way to an unoccupied table.

Her legs were short and Polish, her torso was long and lean. It was like someone cut her parents in half and slapped her mother on the bottom and her father on top and covered them with new skin. You wouldn't call her skin tone 'mocha.' If you wanted to stick to coffee, hers would resemble one of those five dollar Starbucks drinks with too much syrup and cream. Whatever it was, it wasn't one or the other. Despite being short and oddly proportional, Sadah carried herself like she was taller than the world. It was only her own, shoulder length curls that kept her from being taken too seriously: they bounced and it annoyed her to no end.

Anyway, she looked cool. Matrix cool. It wasn't intentional. She bartended at the Triskele and had to stick to a dress code. Black. Alright, so her bag and coat didn't have to be black, too, but the coat was one of her favorites and the bag had a number of handy, zippable interior pockets. Above all, the bag helped her look the part in a number of her other business dealings. Unless you had her card, she was quite mum on what those may be.

This bag, however, was the catalyst for meeting the copper haired tourist with lemon on the side. You see, on her way to chocolate, Sadah was passed by a rather large man. He, apparently, had the foresight of a bat and absolutely no concept of personal space. Instead of choosing any number of different routes to the exit, he tried to squeeze between two tables in a too narrow walkway just as Sadah reached the same point. In her haste to escape his girth, the girl leaned back against a table and did her best to bend away. As she did so, her bag swiped the lemon and a number of pamphlets onto the floor.

When he was finally away and Sadah could breathe again, she had a chance to observe the mess she'd made.

"Damnit," she put her bag down and began to gather up the brochures, "Sorry."