There is a task before you.
What do you desire from this task?
Describe what happens.

*****************************************

Dressed in some flavour of active wear, they looked like they were heading off to play Ultimate or maybe run the steps at Casa Loma, something sporty. She was very pretty, while he looked like your average 20 year-old guy still trying to figure out who he might be. Both of them were smiling, but his grin was goofy, almost excited, like he simply could not believe his good fortune at being out with this girl. After about half an hour they came walking back, but this time she was holding a little bouquet of wildflowers that had clearly been picked from a yard just up the street. Their smiles were different now, everything shining. This sunny, spring afternoon will travel with the boy for the rest of his days, a perfect moment when something beautiful started to come alive– a point of light he will always return to.

*******************************************

Ponderosa

By Dan

Fucking A.

The Ponderosa delivers like a goddamn steak mailman.

Unlimited chocolate milk? Unlimited awesome.

Love the swinging doors and bacon bits, and almost everybody working there was wearing a hairnet, so you know that they’re serious about their crap. I’d definitely go back. Yippee ki-yay, motherfucker!

The Pink Dragon

By Keo

The food is very good here but I swear to God the place is haunted! I went down to the basement to use the bathroom and while I was washing my hands I saw a pale Asian man standing behind me in the mirror, but when I turned around there was nobody there. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but later I was told that the Pink Dragon was built on an old Chinese morgue and was known to be haunted. Apparently a dishwasher stabbed a cook to death there too, and after that they erected those lion-dog sculptures out front to ward off evil spirits. If you take a close look, you’ll notice that there’s no #9 on the menu, and this is because the cook was murdered on the 9th day of September, the 9th month of the year.

Der Speisewagon

By Anthony

Lauren and I used to go to Der Speisewagon together. It was kind of our place. Felt weird, sad-weird to be there alone. When Lauren and I were together German food seemed kind of fun, like a campy polka, but now it just seems blunt and obnoxious. I don’t really remember what I had, some sort of sausage and a shit ton of beer, I think, so you know, just not very memorable. Lauren, she’s memorable. She was my schnitzel.

Chuck E. Cheese’s

By Susan

Look, I know that this is a place for kids, but Jesus Fucking Christ! The food was awful, like garbage they dug out of a hole. Not even a drunk person could eat it. I ordered the “chicken sandwich,” and I am damn sure positive that what they served was not chicken. Maybe goat. Or squirrel. God knows. The staff was lobotomized and dirty, and the kids unsupervised savages. I saw one 6-year-old girl with hot, greasy cheese strands in her hair and two pepperoni slices covering her eyes. The plus side is that they sell beer. I had four. And then, drunk, I drove my son home, swearing to never, ever set foot in that accursed place again. The horror, the horror.

While sitting at my desk and looking out the window I saw a young woman in a pink skirt and a black top passing by on the sidewalk. She was unbelievably happy, the sort of happiness you don’t often discover in the solitary, unguarded moments of pedestrians. There was a huge smile illuminating her face and instead of subsiding after a moment, it just kept getting stronger, evolving and reanimating her features. She was very nearly radiant, bursting with THE BEST NEWS OF HER LIFE. And as this door opened into her life, I watched, now slightly melancholy, remembering college days when oxygen was like light in the lungs, as she turned left and headed toward the horizon.

In front of the Shopper’s Drug Mart there was a busker who likely saw Melissa Etheridge when she looked in the mirror. Wearing a beaten, red leather jacket, her hair was a wild scramble, and she sang with a ferocious, biting confidence. She was middle-aged, and all the songs she was playing were classics from the latter part of the 70s, songs that must have recalled the field parties of her youth when everybody passed joints around the bonfire, nodding along as she sang so fully, her future path seeming so clear.

At Sarah’s Shawarma the woman serving me had big, butcher fingers and the look of a farm worker from Eastern Europe. Her eyes were tender and vulnerable, suggesting that all she wanted to do in this world was help other people. And at the only occupied table in the place sat a thin and pale man wearing a Rush sweatshirt. He was finishing the last of his soup with such a dreamy pleasure that I had no choice but to simply stop and watch—as if bearing witness to a pure and holy moment.

When I stepped out onto the street there was a sudden chorus of Happy Birthday. The voices were in tune, harmonizing, and it was lovely, like music you might imagine hearing from across the water, something passing through time, as if light from a star. I looked around and eventually spotted them, five college-aged boys striding happily down the street singing into a cell phone one of them was holding aloft, “Happy birthday dear Rita, happy birthday to you,” and I thought of Rita in 30 years, one day, for no particular reason, remembering the surprise of this message and those beautiful boys.

“And so they walked by and this one shouted, ‘How r u doing?!’ What, are they crazy, do they think that’s the right way to talk to a girl? Is that all they know? “

The girl who never got attention from boys nodded her head in some sort of eager accommodation, grateful for this glimpse into the romantic sphere of college life, while the girl who was always disappointed seemed validated, her face now angrier.

And then a gust of wind blew a tumble of leaves over the dog and I, and when I looked up I saw a familiar homeless man pacing the street, negotiating the angles of a completely different world, and then a pretty girl with bouncing blonde hair ran past him, past us and the Sorority girls,  bounding down the street toward her destiny.