hey i know that im a bit overdue for this chapter... ok, maybe a couple months late, but here it is :)
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He stood, staring at the food on the table. It was abandoned. Heaps of salad, steak, and mashed potatoes spilling joyfully over the sides of the plate, left behind by two greedy well-fedgodd-for-nothing women.
An entire glass of water—an entire glass! —sat next to the plate on the table covered with a pure white table cloth. And coffee too.
Steaming, wafting its delicious caffeine-rich smell into his nostrils. There was no one around to see the strands of saliva that trickled thickly from the corners of the Boy's mouth.
His stomach was completely empty, not even a crum of his last meal remained. All of the street-side vendors had shooed him away whenever they saw him. They now knew his face, the albino orphan begger. And he was unable to steal even a pie left to cool in the baker's open window.
His stomach gave a feeble growl. He needed food.
He needed it now.
The waiters from the corner restaurant hadn't noticed that the two women had left the table yet and every one else in the restaurant was too busy eating and chatting away their happy lives to notice the starving albino outside Le Bordeaux restaurant. Standing and salivating.
The skinny street was completely deserted except for the occasional beggar or homeless person. And the less-than-occasional stick shift taxi cab. So nobody noticed The Boy as he slithered up to the patio table and stuffed the contents of both the plated into the woven breadbasket, chugged the icy water, and downed the tiny espresso.
Just as the warm caffeine-enriched elixir slid down his throat, he heard a man's voice shout at him. The voice was speaking French and was slightly muffled from behind the glass of the restaurant, but the meaning was clear.
"Hé! Vous! Part de là! Tombe la nourriture!" Hey! You! Get out of here! Drop the food!
The boy did not drop the food that was now clutched to his chest in the small basket, but he did take the former advice and ran away from the patio as fast as his legs could carry him. And with the espresso now in his stomach, it was quite fast.
The restaurant waiter that had yelled at the Boy did not give chase, it's just another beggar, after all, he thought to himself, and that food would have gone to waste anyway.
The Boy did not stop until he reached the end of the street and darted into an alleyway close to his home warehouse. There he wolfed down the delicious, juicy steak, the mashed potatoes, salad, and two of the three pieces of bread.
Those women must have been American, he thought, no other Frenchwoman would have ordered such a meal.
He did not give much more thought to this matter, and turned his thoughts back to eating.
When he was finished, he patted his overfull stomach and sighed gleefully with the wonderful feeling of digestion. He could barely move from this relieved feeling.
When the weight in his stomach loosened slightly and he was able to walk, he grabbed his one piece of bread, which he was too full to eat, and hobbled over to the warehouse basement, feeling revived and reborn.
He slunk into his corner of the warehouse basement, where he had fashioned a bed out of old flour and rice sacks, and silently fell asleep.
Then his entire world blew up in his face.
Literally.
