Twelve minutes ago, I ran out of water.

Seven minutes ago, I ran out of cubes.

Now I’ve run out of patience.

My eyes are trailing you around, but somehow yours have never met them. You’ve delivered to everyone else around me, I’m the undiscovered island with wet ambitions. And your routes have been suspiciously circuitous. You slithered around the bar on hands and knees. You exited the building and reemerged through the freight entrance. You parachuted in. You creaked up through the floor boards. You vaporized and transported yourself in your own little metallic watering can. That one was ironic.

But I can’t drink irony, not that you’d ever serve it to me. It has to be water. Forgive me, I don’t mean to sound needy; it’s just that, biologically speaking, I actually do need water. This restaurant is a heart and you, sir, you are its carotid artery. Its high school dropout, dope addict of a carotid artery. And arteries can’t stand around skimming Men’s Vogue the way you are right now.

(flip napkin –>)

Pardon my staring. I just don’t feel that you’ve prioritized us very well. The blonde at the bar is drinking coke, and you brought her lemon for her water. Was it really necessary to upgrade her back up drink? You topped off the man with the glass 7/8ths full. Just in case. You watered the couple sharing the grapes, the purple fucking water balloons. You remember what I got, right? The triple cajun wasabe?

Have you read about the scientists sending robots to mars to find water?

Were you their server?

Server. That’s it, isn’t it? This is busser’s last stand. You want to be master; anywhere else I can get my own water, but not here, not in your little fiefdom. You do a good job and you’ll be promoted to a new role, oxygen man, you’ll just depressurize the whole damn place and go around handing out air to your chosen few, I’ll be choking on my own vomit and you’ll be asking grandma if she’d like a little lemon with her air, can you get her a straw, some sparkling oxygen.

It’s hard to concentrate in here with the voices.

(cont. on ketchup label –>)

Why do they keep saying the same thing?

Dry eyes?
    Clear eyes.
        It has an ingredient to moisturize.
            Wow.

(see sweet ‘n low wrapper –>)

Is this what happens before you die?

Is Ben Stein God?

Because I think I may be. Dying, I mean. Or drying. They say human bodies are 75% water, but I just passed the quarter mark. And now, then, a toast (of what?) to my last supper (walk on water? I can’t even get a refill), as the eyes roll back in my head (does Clear Eyes have an ingredient for that?), and my paper-thin body is
  s
 l
  i
 n
  k
 ing
out of this chair and into a puddle on the floor. Oh, it’s not death that concerns me. I worry that I have made a mess, and

(fortune cookie label –>)

I can’t even get your attention
to clean me off the floor.