by Judith Shapiro

You believed in a moral order. In a world where kindness prevailed, overshadowing all the rest. You didn’t fire the waiter who sold pounds of fresh shrimp from the walk-in through the back door of the restaurant, an hour later stood in the same spot, handed the cash to her dealer. It was a busy Saturday night and you needed her. And, honestly, she needed you. As did the bartender who called from jail, pulled over for another offense. You’d bail him out for the last time. Until the next time. You learned at a young age that the moral order is not fixed nor is it fair. Waiters will be shrimp thieves. Bartenders will be drunk drivers. Fathers will leave their wives for younger, flashier models, take on new children not their own. Life will be unfair, people will be forgiven and when the chef, writhing in pain, points to his belly, says his chitlins hurt, you’ll pile him into your car, sit together on gray plastic chairs in the emergency room, long into the night.

Judith Shapiro is a writer from Washington, DC, who spends half the year in Monterey, CA, perpetually confused about which way is north and marveling at the sun that sets on the horizon instead of rising. When the memoir she’s writing looks the other way, she secretly delights in flash prose and poetry. Her work appears in The Citron Review, The New York Times, Bending Genres, The Sun, among others, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.