The Romanian Busboy

Abraham Zimmer, awaking from troubled sleep, placed his feet nimbly on to the floor, pulled on his trousers, Kaki’s with cuffed bottoms, a shirt with blue twill stitching, double-tied his shoes and shot the dog. He’d been thinking about shooting the dog for some time now, but it was this morning, a morning like any other, that he did it. He made a fried egg sandwich, Turkish coffee with rosewater he’d bought the day before, opened the morning paper and began to read, taking small morsel bites of the sandwich, which he held to his chest on a small tea-set saucer, and equally small sips of coffee. His wife ran off with the busboy from the Romanian delicatessen, a rakishly short boy with an air about him that unnerved people, many of whom were Romanian. Abraham Zimmer, being of unsound mind and decrepit body, hated the idea that his wife was fucking a man much shorter than he, a busboy, at that, with rotting teeth and yellow eyes. The dog never saw it coming, nor for that matter did Abraham Zimmer, for whom life was a random series of reoccurring events, many of which reoccurred more often than he would have liked them to. It was either him or the dog, and as the dog had no common sense the choice was simple, quite simple indeed. Abraham Zimmer awoke from unsettled dreams and yawned, another morning he’d be late for work, another day figuring out ways to stop the reoccurring from occurring again. He’d dreamt that he’d shot the dog, or was it a Romanian busboy, the difference seemed negligible, so he placed his feet on the floor, nimbly, pulled on his kaki trousers, double-tied his shoes and shot himself.