Ordering a Chicken Kiev and the entire restaurant turns silent. The waiter, dead in his tracks slowly bends down to where you’re sitting, meeting you at eye level. Everybody is looking at you, you can feel it. The music has stopped.
“Sir.” the waiter says, somehow drawing out more syllables than a single I has ever been able to produce. You can smell his breath as his mouth opens, it reeks of death.
“It’s pronounced chicken Kyiv.” He maintains eye contact as his left hand grabs your face. You want to defend yourself, but that would be uncivil and you wouldn’t want to be uncivil, would you? Of course you wouldn’t, you can’t even understand why you would question such a thing. He puts his fingers in your eyes, they’re pushing, his long black nails driving first into your pupils and then past them. The nails go above and then around your eye socket. They’re moving around back there, searching for something.
Suddenly you hear a pop. The waiter has removed his hands, he’s standing up again.
“My mistake.” You say. “One chicken Kyiv please.”
The waiter responds “Slava Ukraini”.
And then the entire restaurant clapped.