Sue-icide, Dicks & The Spectacle

This is a short beginning of a story influenced by the narrative flow & certain themes eluding to "the spectacle" in Cock and Bull. I want to start experimenting with Will Self's style of creating a series of changeable narrators as one entity. In the novel they all seem to stem from the same "self", yet establish varying viewpoints through different voices.

Between 3:30 and 4:30 was the golden hour in dump diners like Simply Delicious. Just after the late crowds and right before the early birds. Sue watched the servers blankly performing their end of shift duties; rolling silverware, slopping the clear vinyl table wraps with rags soaked in milky gray bleach water, counting out tips. The pungent overlap of mac and cheese or meatloaf shift meals for the closers mingled with bacon, fried eggs and cinnamon toast for the breakfast crew. This uncomfortable scent and the damp antiseptic of the bleach rags filled the room.
Sue’s reflection stuck to the corner of the TV set in the corner of my eye, and held there. The box of noise distracted her, once again. from writing the tale of her own death. As I expected, she was in the same booth, as she had always been, with nothing to show or shine; all she had was a fifty-cent black coffee in her hand and pair of periscope eyes.
I have watching Sue in her projection booths, like this one, firing great stories at the wall. The influences that have created her escape route for finding her "true meaning" are piled high in a stack on the table beside her winter mug: a collection of obituaries.
She sits shuffling her black boots back and forth against the booth, like she’s headed somewhere better than this. She's far too well aware of her own cynicism and its made her narcissistic, as she sits with a face veiled in roseblack lien, a bleeding pen in her right hand, and carbon black spectacles framed around her mink-blue eyes. Like clock-work, this inescapable routine, same booth, same black coffee, had become formulaic to the point of no returning. She knew too much. She read the top of the peppershaker with her fingertips as though a piece of Braille, but learned nothing.
The distraction of the blaring TV keeps her from realizing that I’m still watching. It always seems its the thing you knew was there, but weren’t expecting, that brings the end to the story.
Sue thought herself a master and maker of her fate, and she was ready to end it every day. Though her tomorrow was no longer written on the sky, she couldn't stop looking out of the window of the diner, the page in front of her soon-to-be "sue-icide" still empty.
Some news story was sounding now, an urgent report about a girl who ate one-too-manymarshmallows while playing the popular child’s game “fluffy bunny.” She choked to death, but now holds the title of having engulfed the most marshmallows. Now, there was an epic ending, and Sue could not help from laughing. News events like these must be fictionalized, and the line was never boldly drawn between fact and fiction.

Still, in the case of marshmellow girl, Sue's loose change of the general grieving should have been unpocketed, and a man across the diner was staring at her. The skin of half of his face was covered in burn marks, and though his eyes were slitty they managed to laugh along with her. A spoon winked from his hand as he teetered it up his lips. A constant schlip shliping sounded from the moist pocket between his palm and the top of his tall forehead as he repeatedly slicked back the last wispy tuft that had survived his hairline’s long recession. The sweat dripped over his brow, down his nose. His lips moved mumbling, half speaking the words in his brain, and the soles of his Chucks slid squeaking back and forth across the parquet. But his back was already to the wall, and like her, this man seemed as though he had nowhere left to go.
His name was Richard, but as most Richards were regularly nick-named, he was called "Dick". The interchanging of the names Richard/Dick still doesn’t make much sense, not even to him. Dick withdrew the coin, a 1943 steel war penny, and stuffed the rest of the change back into his pocket. He admired a thick crescent of gunk on the coin’s rim and then tucked it in his cheek alongside his gums. The penny was fine in a pinch, the kind a low-life crack addict is certain to love. There was left over residue on the penny, and Dick knew it wouldn’t be enough to really matter, but just knowing that it was inside of him was enough to get him hot. Simple things become meaningful with drugs. Common objects whose lives were once secret glow soft with whispers.
Dick could breathe again as he swished the penny against his gums, and his erection underneath the table went from full mass to half mass. This was after all a day of mourning, and he couldn't shake the feeling someone was watching.