Never Ever Brenda Shaughnessy, 1970 Alarmed, today is a new dawn, and that affair recurs daily like clockwork, undone at dusk, when a new restaurant emerges in the malnourished night. We said it would be this way, once this became the way it was. So in a way we were waiting for it. I still haven’t eaten, says the cook in the kitchen. A compliant complaint. I never eat, says the slender diner. It’s slander, and she’s scared, like a bully pushing lettuce around. The cook can’t look, blind with hunger and anger. I told a waiter to wait for me and I haven’t seen him since. O it has been forty minutes it has been forty years. Late is a synonym for dead which is a euphemism for ever. Ever is a double-edged word, at once itself and its own opposite: