great wall 4

 I wonder if that phone Beagles got was what they call a burner phone, one of those things you buy when you are on a secret mission and don't want anybody to trace you.  I went through quite a kerfuffle before I got my current super phone, about phones and pay plans and ended up with an andriod, and a consumer cellular payment plan.

It's okay.  The phone itself cost a hundred bucks and the payment plan is fifty a month, which I guess is kind of high.  I thought I would save money by getting rid of my landline but when I called RCN they said it was all part of a bundle and it wouldn't save me any money so I kept it.  I give it to sources where I think they might leave a message that I would want to hear if I am not home.  My cell has a phonemail thing but when you try to receive your messages it asks for some password, which I have never given it.  I called them up about it, they are good about that and they talked me through some procedure which was a little bit complicated and then a few days later it was asking for that procedure again and I just quit fucking with that.  Anyway most of the phonemails I was able to retrieve were in Chinese.

It's kind of pesky, and it always wants to talk to me and do me some favor I don't want.  But it's nice to see what's up on the internet when you are waiting in a long line or like last night when I wanted to sit on my balcony when it was too dark to read a book.

The story is just beginning.  The tale of the waitress with her eyes frozen shut is true.  The story about Leon's brother is not, but it is the sort of thing that well could happen.

Annette had these little glasses, little square glasses that she wore perched low on her little bird nose so that when she talked to you she bent her head back and looked down past her little nostrils, and with that and her hair always pulled back, and her always dead serious manner, she was like a first grade teacher, except not as interesting. 

Every afternoon between the lunch rush and the dinner rush she sat down at the table across from the bar and laid out some stupid astrology romance magazine and carefully read out loud everything that pertained to her sign.  After each item would follow her analysis, the chances that she, herself, would find romance, that some tall dark handsome Leo would comment on the black bean sauce and their eyes would meet over the spindle where the paid dinner checks were skewered once the money was in the cash register.  She would pause, looking up from the magazine, lick her thin red-lipsticked lips, who might be kissing her this very evening?  Nobody ever had, as far as I could tell, and it was not an image I chose to dwell upon.  

I saw that Dawn was skewered in front of her now.  She had a book bag in front of her, and it looked like she thought that she was going to do some reading, but I knew that Annette would never let her get away with that, when the more pressing matter of Annette’s imaginary love life, the pressing of her thin lips, needed to be pondered. 

I had to get her back, get her away from Annette. There was something about her, something she knew maybe, some little spark of something, her heroism, her Chinese opera dancing, her own pale pink smiling lips, that I had to rescue from the dull depths of Annette’s imaginary astrology love life.  Just then Vincent, the newest of the cooks passed by the bar on the way between the kitchen and his little room upstairs.