The Burkshelf

I sit with my girlfriend in a plastic booth at McDonald’s and watch as Ms. Li unwraps her McFish sandwich. She had paid for it, and for our McFood as well, with a hundred dollar bill from the early 1900s that the cashier lady had to counterfeit check twice before just about emptying the register to make the change.

Spreading the McFish paper out carefully on the fake marbling of the plastic table, Ms. Li bites open a packet of mayonnaise, which she squirts across her fried McSquare of McFish. This is followed by a full packet of grape jelly, which plurps down over the squirt of mayo and sinks through before Ms. Li replaces the McBun.

Before we leave, she’ll wrap our last two unopened McKetchup packets in a wad of about fifty McNapkins and shove them into the unseen depths of her musty purse. Right now, though, as she eats, she explains to us in her broken and confused English that she doesn’t ever go to the dentist because dentistry terrifies her. According to her, a friend or sister or cousin (I couldn’t discern which even as the story was first being told) went to the dentist once to get a tooth pulled and her gums just never stopped bleeding afterward. She eventually bled to death from the gap in her teeth, and that was enough to damn oral hygienists everywhere in Ms. Li’s eyes.

I’m not sure I entirely believe the story. I’m not sure I entirely believe anything about Ms. Li.

Read for yourself