Jeff Kidwell

The Drawing of Haniya

It was 7:35 and gray, an unsettling gray, a gray deprived of normal sunshine and the quiet ebullience of her gentle friend. She'd not had a Friday morning in two years when he wasn't there, when he didn't walk through the steel and glass doors of the diner somewhere between 6:55 and 7:00. He sat at the furthest booth the first time she poured his coffee and took his order, and every Friday for the last two years he would sit at the same booth in the back, cheerfully and quietly waiting to greet her.