Neale Graham

notes on last night's dinner

Charlie sat in front of the Mario Arbuckle painting in the Smithsonian Museum of American Wonders as the scene from the night before played in his mind. His girlfriend had left him at the restaurant where he’d taken her to celebrate her promotion, which she had beat out seventeen other junior associates to win. The promotion came with a $20,000 bonus, even. She had worked relentlessly for the last eight months, rising at five most mornings so she could squeeze in a run before showering, slip into one of a dozen of her dark suits, pour a big cup of coffee, and walk to her office a mile from their apartment. At the office, she researched case law and drafted motions to defend doctors from their former patients. Who, the former patients alleged, the very professionals with whom they had entrusted their health and welfare had managed, sometimes even intentionally and maliciously designed, to exploit that trust and to actually even further complicate and damage the already tenuous physical states of the patients they had been charged to care for and heal. Allegedly, of course, she always added. The doctors had taken oaths, the allegations always intoned, and had broken them, tumbling from their pedestals, now crumbled pillars of the community.