A girl sits in the window seat. She’s been waiting here forever – dried lipgloss on her mug, cold coffee, hair once carefully curled now lank with delay. She looks out thru the glass – her face a blueprint of all the faces she’s seen in her lifetime, consumed and incorporated without knowledge. All around her people go about their business – not a one of them caring, no one in this place invested in her life, none privy to the ways in which the world breaks her heart, dashes her dreams, kills her cat.  

Only the timeworn wooden chairs and tilted tables know how she feels – they’ve seen her a thousand times in a thousand different incarnations. Horace McCoy would feed the girl her lines if he were still alive, “I Should Have Stayed Home,” he’d whisper in her ear and she’d look into the camera and repeat, “I Should Have Stayed Home,” “I Should Have Stayed Home.”