Works by Ben Balazs

We ate our meal as jauntily as we could, setting aside our uncertain feelings for the surrounding décor, which at its best must have been plucked from a lost-and-found of the 50s. It was hard to stare at the ceramic dish between my palms, as its sheen reflected the pasty yellow lighting of this diner. I tried shifting my seat as an attempt at making the meal more comfortable, but was interrupted by a loose tile in the floor. It meagerly trapped the leg of my chair, begging to be returned to its place in the ground below. I scoffed it away with another grunt and tug of the budget throne, managing to snap the age-old tile in the process.  Before creating enough of a scene to pull the other guests away from their colorless food, I scraped my chair back into position and hastily grabbed the nearest fork. I could see stains where the washer must have forgotten to scrub, and suddenly I felt the need to distract my fellows from whatever it was that might have inhabited their plates. ...