Her hair hangs over her brooding eyes like the curtains before a Broadway show.  I pretend to read as I watch her click, click, click away making dead beats on her keyboard.

Hi, I would say.  Hi, she would reply.  Then silence, and a devouring awkward heat.

She’s one of those real New York broads with a skip to her step, a skip to a rhythm that only she can hear.

People shuffle between shelves, carrying books or freshly made coffees from the attached Starbucks.  They frustrate me as they block my view of her.  Her hair is black.  She bites her lower lip softly as she types, and she pushes her glaring glasses up every time she takes a sip from her paper cup.  Her eyes look tired from a late night of dancing, cocaine, and pulsing music.  Her fingers delicately jump from letter to letter as I watch, and I can only imagine what she’s writing.  It’s probably something pretentious; a story of love and Paris. 

She looks like she loves Paris, maybe because of a trip there, but she has a definite distaste for all that is American.  She’s probably writing about smoking cigarettes, and discussing Foucault on a park bench while birds flutter by and bore the public.  That’s so pedestrian, she would say, and they would laugh.  Her fingers prance and tell the story of finding herself in a foreign land, a land of culture, a land of style and grace, because America is too ugly, too commercial, too unrealistic.

As I imagine the story she’s writing, violent blood begins to wash my veins, and hate radiates from my eyes.  This is my America.  This is my country, and not in a nationalistic way, but in a pride of the beauty of landscape, diversity, and opportunity.  These are my people who work steel, who mine the earth, who forge the frontiers of the western world.

The longer I look at her the more disgust I feel.  Her bony fingers annoyingly clip-clop across her keyboard as ungracefully as a mule.  Her frizzed unkempt hair hangs down over her greasy forehead.  Every time she takes a drink from her cliché capitalistic consumerist paper cup she sips as elegantly as a dog lapping up water from a dish.  Her love looks cheap like a supermarket romance novel.

My tongue rots with distaste.  She’s the problem with this country, no, everything.  She preaches against the establishment, but becomes a bureaucrat through the week.  She talks animal rights, but eats veal.  She.  She.  She.

“You are what’s wrong with the world!”  I holler.

People freeze and look at me.  I grip my book tightly out of hate and realise what I’m doing.  This is a public place, I tell myself.  The heat of confused eyes grows.  Her eyes seem to be soothing.  She doesn’t look at me out of bewilderment, but understanding.  A small smile parts her face.

“Akkkkhhmmm!” 

I violently clear my throat.  I loosen my strangling grip on the novel in my hands, and turn the page as if I’d been reading the whole time.  Everyone forgets and continues on as usual. 

Now it’s her eyes on me.