"I got stitches in it from my hip to my kneecap," the lady was saying. She had a cane and was wearing a shabby gray sweat-suit and had a white flat-top hair cut. Her face was fixed in a state of outraged stupefaction, like the physical memory of an old soul-shocking trauma.

"What can I get you?" The brown man in the silver box asked me. The lunch cart had two windows, the one I was at and one to my left where a second brown man was getting the lady's order ready.

"Green tea, large, with nothing in it," I said.

"Nothing in it?"

"Yes," I said. "No sugar, no lemon. Nothing."

He turned around to get my tea and said something that I didn't hear because I was back to listening to the lady. "It got all infected. They put the stitches in but they said it got too infected so now I gotta go back on Dee-sember the fifteenth to get the leg off." She stared wide-eyed and vacant through the lunch cart window. The two brown faces had retreated into the box. There was no response. Time stood still, waiting for an acknowledgment of this sudden pronouncement of one of its little horrors. "I said 'you're gonna get drunk,'" the man at my window said suddenly.

"What?"

He handed me my 'Green Tea Large With Nothing In It', which when the other guy took my order, which was most days, he called 'Green Tea Straight Up.' A baby cockroach walked across the glistening surface of the greasy lubricous on-the-inside cellophane pastry wrappers. I handed the money over the pastries and cockroach on the counter to the man inside. He was smiling; he liked his joke. I liked it, too. I laughed extra loud so he would hear and not explain it to me.

"They're going to make me a wooden leg," the lady said from behind me as I walked away.