METANOIA

HIPSTERAUNT

The rain was long over by now; the uprising was quelled. Misha and Silas were almost ready to leave the building while a twenty-something brunette in an athletic outfit was trying to get inside. She was trying to juggle her keys and her groceries at the entrance to their building, desperate to unlock the heavy door. She was rather frustrated by the time they reached her, and Misha chivalrously unlocked the door from inside. As she entered, he held the door for her; she smiled back appreciatively. Her eyes locked on his as she walked under his pumped up bicep, which he flexed purposefully. Misha had never seen her before, but still, as an opener threw in "So, you do live here?" pretending he had seen her before.

Then he made "the Face." Misha has a face he occasionally made, which according to Silas, was somewhere between a duckface and Derek Zoolander's Magnum. It shouldn't and would not work for any other man, but for some reason, even unknown to the Deities of Amour, it worked for Misha. It was a gift, although probably not from heaven.

Her eyes darting about his face, Misha's presumable neighbor blushed instantly took over, and held the door for them with her foot as they left. She was speechless with her mouth hanging half open. Silas couldn't believe it, but it had worked yet again. When they were out of her range, Silas turned to Misha and said, "She was cute; does she live in your building?"

Misha couldn't contain the laughter any longer as he burst, "No man, I have no fucking clue who she is, I was just practicing. She was cute, though." He nodded matter-of-factly.

Silas smiled, "I see you haven't lost your touch."

Misha grinned, "Of course not, man. New York has been good to me." He nodded slightly and smiled at two women walking toward the duo, and as they passed him, he spun around to take a better look. They smiled and waved back. He sighed to himself... "But now, let's eat..." his index finger came up instinctively, more to silence Silas' filthy mind than to point at anything in particular "...food."

They walked for two blocks until they arrived at a restaurant with a particularly French feel. The entrance was through a glass hall with Art Nouveau floral patterns. The ground was rough with some sort of epoxy and had splotches of paint on it. The tables were barely a foot and a half wide and were made of simple plywood with little care for aesthetics, which in a post-modernist manner helped achieve a bizarre perfection in the zeitgeist of the joint.

Misha noted Silas' eyes darting all over the place and asked, "You like this hipsteraunt?"

There was an old wooden cabinet with an ancient looking TV with a static fizz that delivered the daily news. Really low indie music hummed as the background noise. The food was often served on random objects rather than trays or plates.

A slightly chubby girl in her twenties with oversized horn-rimmed glasses, wearing a loose fitting shirt and jeans that looked like tights, seated them at a table for two. Silas took his phone from his pocket and placed it on the table. The water droplet just stood there defiantly, but Silas still didn't notice it.

As the tables were barely a foot apart, the people at adjacent tables could hear each other very clearly. The interior design encouraged people to interact with other tables, rather than be isolated, and in that sense, it was successful.

A family of three sat on the one side of the two guys: a fat, under-stimulated woman with an Eastern European accent had a Chihuahua sticking out from between her oversized tits; she sat across from an older Western European man with a metallic heart valve that rat-a-tatted faster depending on how loud his wife was. The two of them were talking mostly to themselves about their troubled, redheaded daughter, whose lips were mumbling something to her detached parents about a miscarriage or something. On the other side was a couple with odd haircuts and androgynous attire; one was a Chinese girl whose facial features were beautiful individually, but their union had somehow muddied their separate charm. Across from her was an Irish guy with strawberry blonde hair, chin fuzz, and freckles. His glasses resembled binoculars, and he stuttered every time Silas raised his arm too close to his face. They were on their first Tinder date, which up until now had been something of a letdown. They didn't know they were in for a treat.