Tyrel Kessinger
A Tiny Mountain

Ramiro, who didn’t smoke, was on his mandatory smoke break out behind the restaurant when he saw Danielle the server’s very large boyfriend shove her against a wall. To the untrained eye, the rain that fell may have obscured the incident, seeing nothing more than a couple in love, but Ramiro knew violence when he saw it.

He turned when he heard movement at the door. Doug, one of the busboys, kicked the door open with a pencil-skinny leg and emerged in reverse, several garbage bags dangling from pencil-skinny arms like pigs on a spit. When he saw Ramiro he caught his breath.

“Jesus Christ!” he said. “You scared the holy tits outta me, man!” Doug laughed, a sound that reminded Ramiro of a weasel, if weasels could laugh. He was fond neither of Doug’s crudeness nor his weasel laugh.

“Jesus Christ. Hiding in the shadows like goddamn Batman.” Weasel laugh.

Ramiro smiled with a polite meekness. He mimed smoking a cigarette. Like everyone else Doug assumed Ramiro didn’t know much English. Ramiro liked it better that way.

“Smoke break. Gotcha.” Doug said, nodding. Ramiro stepped back as Doug launched the fat black garbage bags over the top of the dumpster where they landed with solid thunks. He dusted off his hands as if he’d accomplished something and turned back to Ramiro, a cigarette pack emerging from his apron pocket.

“You know, you might actually be the only one of us assholes here who doesn’t actually smoke,” he said, firing a light-pink plastic lighter. He raised the pack to Ramiro and shook it at him. “C’mon. You ain’t gonna die from just one, amigo.”

Ramiro shook his head no, again offering the polite and meek smile. If polite and meek smiles were ever worth anything, Ramiro thought, he would have enough money to buy an empty island somewhere where he’d never have to spend any amount of time standing behind a reeking restaurant dumpster politely and meekly smiling at someone he gave not even one half of a rat’s ass about.

“All right. Have it your way.” Doug shrugged his thin, also very weasel-like shoulders and frowned as if his feelings were hurt.

Danielle’s boyfriend had briefly settled into a calm, as much as a man like him could settle into calmness Ramiro figured, but he was soon again barking unintelligible words thick with the threat of violence.

“Goddamn,” Doug said, the clearly annoyed tone of his words betraying his carefree poise as he produced perfect smoke ring after perfect smoke ring. “The lovebirds. Jesus Christ.” He rolled his eyes and mimed masturbation with his free hand.

Ramiro made a face that he hoped invited further detail. Doug the busboy took the bait, motioning with a jerk of his head. “Danielle and Brent. Fighting. Shit happens, like, all the goddamn time. She said they broke up, but hell, they always go back, don’t they? Anyway, one time, a couple years ago, we had another shift manager, guy named Jeff. Now, Jeff was real cool, chill. We even smoked together after work sometimes. He always had some quality shit. But anyway, dumbass tried to stop Brent when he tore into Danielle one time. Let’s just say there’s a reason why Steve is the night manager now.”

Doug chuckled, as if the tragic tale of Jeff the ex-night manager was actually an endearing romantic comedy. Ramiro nodded, signaling he understood but offered no smile in return.

“Eh. Whatever. It’s like, you know, shit or get off the pot, I say.”

Doug took a last draw and expertly flicked the butt over the lip of the dumpster, dusting his hands again, another gold medal feat.

Doug opened the door. “Late crowd’s about to pick up, amigo. Better quit stalking and get your ass in gear.” Ramiro couldn’t help but wince as Doug and his weasel laugh faded down the corridor.



Ramiro resumed watching the fighting couple. The lovebirds. He saw Brent wrap an angry hand around Danielle’s wrist, preventing her from leaving as she tried to jerk away. Maybe someone else would have intervened by now but Ramiro had seen so much violence in his life that a woman he barely knew getting roughed up by an inordinately angry boyfriend ranked substantially low on the totem pole of bothersome. You watch a fist of grown men carelessly bury a tiny mountain of decapitated women and children and there’s very little afterward that can make you shy away. He’d always be grateful to whatever god wanted the credit that there’d been no eyes to stare back at him. He never asked anyone what they did with the heads. He didn’t have to.

Danielle finally tore away her arm, the force of which causing her to fall to a knee. She was crying. Even through the camouflage of rain, Ramiro knew. Brent clapped his hands and laughed maniacally. Danielle stood up and trudged off, a growing blossom of blood painting her right knee. Brent yelled more vulgarity and continued his taunting. He retrieved an empty beer bottle from the ground and threw it. Ramiro was reasonably sure he had missed on purpose but Danielle wasn’t. She startled at the crash but continued walking.

Danielle didn’t see Ramiro until she was at the back door. She jumped again which made Ramiro feel a little bad. Or maybe it was embarrassment. He tried to offer her his patented smile.

“Enjoy the show, asshole?” she asked acidly, her face scarred with running makeup.

Ramiro knew a clueless smile would be of little use here.

“I,” he began, slowly, completely unsure of what to say or how to say it. “I—”

“Oh, just fuck off,” she hissed. She threw the door open as if to see if she had the strength to rip it from it’s frame and whisked inside as if she were a lightning bolt.

The drizzle shifted to a dense, steady rain. Ramiro stood and listened to it pelt the cars in the back lot, the dumpster, the overhang. He tried to find the silence in between the banter of the rain but quickly realized how ridiculous the idea of something like that was.

The door clanked open again. Steve the night manager’s bald head appeared.

“Sorry, bud. Break time’s over. Buncha peckerhead college kids just came in. Gonna need you to get on the bathrooms before you hit the dishes though. They are rank, bud.”

He nodded and followed Steve inside, nearly colliding with Danielle at the intersection of the kitchen and the back corridor. She’d sloppily bandaged the knee and her face was still a bit puffy, hair still damp. In the short span of time she’d somehow managed to dry off and restore her makeup. A cartoon-themed band-aid covered the wound on her knee.

She smiled at him, bright as a star in its prime, and put a hand on his shoulder.

“My goodness, I’m sorry, Ramiro! Me and my two left feet, huh?”

She winked at him as if they might have known each other in another life and sauntered out to the table of boisterously drunk college students. Ramiro, caught off guard, tried to decipher the meaning behind Danielle’s sudden transformation but failed. Or gave up. He wasn’t sure there was a difference. He could only smile in return. Polite and meek. Not that he cared to any degree that mattered. What Ramiro didn’t do was worry if a middle-aged waitress with a lunatic boyfriend liked him or not.

Ramiro wrangled the cleaning cart from the storage room and made his way to the restrooms. They were much nastier than Steve had let on but he’d smelled worse things, like death and the freshly dug earth of graves. He cleaned steadfastly, methodically; removing a smear of runny feces from a toilet lid, wiping down the cold slime of the sink, spraying everything down with the noxious, industrial-grade disinfectant he thought might be giving him ass cancer. At least it was honest work, he guessed. He tried whistling the melody of an old song his mother had sang when he was a child but as always he only succeeded in butchering it. Briefly, between refilling the soap dispensers and knifing a bright pink glob of gum molded into the shape of a penis off the wall, he reflected on the only safe truth he’d ever known, how things are rarely as bad as they have every right to be.

Tyrel Kessinger is a stay-at-home dad of two wild animals. His work can be found at Gargoyle, Triggerfish Critical Review, Straylight, and forthcoming from Washington Square Review, Red Rock Review, Atticus Review, and Typehouse. He also serves time as Poetry Editor for Great Lakes Review.