Specials
She won’t tell you the specials unless you ask.
“You’re expected to participate in this life,”
she says.
“So don’t be shy.
Just ask.”
She taps her name tag
with a finger like a switchblade
testing its hinge
and says, “This ain’t me.”
Tammy’s real name is Dorothy.
She’ll go on to tell you that Tammy
is the best waitress
in the whole world.
If mountains had heartstrings,
she’d wrap them around her knuckles
and mine them for something loud enough
to survive.
Dorothy has set the bar so high
for ‘world’s best waitress’,
that I wonder about Tammy.
How could she hold a candle
to this woman who’s kicking wisdom into me
as swiftly as she’s kicking
the bullshit out?
Dorothy doesn’t ask if you want coffee.
She pours it—hot, precise—
leaves just enough room
for cream, for sugar,
“if that’s how you like it.”
I don’t even drink regular coffee,
but she’s danced this dance long enough
that I can tell
her grace depends on it.
She’s been punished over empty cups,
blamed for long nights,
held accountable for someone else’s morning.
She holds her pen like a warning.:
“I don’t take orders. Only requests.”
If you forget yourself,
she’ll point to the sign:
Shoes and shirts are nice,
but manners are a must.
She tells me about dreams.
“They’re helium balloons,” she says.
“I’ve let go of a few,
but I still got this one.”
She twists an invisible string around her finger.
“Even if I don’t believe in marriage,
I’m bringing this one home.”
I want to ask what it is.
But today it’s enough
that she’s holding on.
The other diners call her blunt.
I call her exact.
Like the girl in the front row
whose hand is always raised—
not because she has the answer
but because she’s willing
to ask the question.
“So who’s Tammy?”
I finally ask one morning.
I see the moment
her throat closes.
There’s a story in that silence—
the kind that leaves photographs
face-down in drawers.
She smiles;
it’s tight.
“You haven’t touched your coffee, sugar.”
Not every question gets answered.
Some stories borrow other people’s names
to move through the world unnoticed.
I know what it means
to lock up after the cook goes home,
to cross a dark parking lot
wondering which men understood
you were not to be tested.
I know the shape of that edge.
Still—
she won’t tell me.
It isn’t on the menu today.
Her eyelids are ledges,
and too much has already stepped off them.
This space is a gift,
and I’m only here
because she allows it.
It would be easier
if everything worth knowing
were chalked above the counter.
But some things are better left
off-menu.
Dorothy clears the cup
without asking.
And I let it stay empty.
Isabella Nesheiwat is a writer based in Southern California. Her work often moves between the sacred and the everyday, examining labor, desire, and the stories people keep off-menu. She has been published previously, but most of her work lives on Substack.
The Marbled Sigh 