The sign at the front desk of the restaurant was emphatic: “WAIT TO BE SEATED.” No “Please” or “Thank you”. Bernie and his date, Sally, glanced at each other in awkward silence. “YES,” a gruff voice boomed from a speaker on the desk, “DO YOU HAVE A BOOKING?” Bernie stared into the webcam taped to the speaker.

This is the opening paragraph from A Window Table, a short story I “lost” for six months before sharing on the Tall And True writers’ website in March 2024. Please note that the Story Insight below contains spoilers.

Story Insight

I wrote A Window Table in August 2023 for the Australian Writers’ Centre’s monthly Furious Fiction writing challenge. The brief was was:

• The story had to take place in a RESTAURANT.
• Include a character who smashes something.
• And the words EUPHORIA, LABYRINTH and SILHOUETTE.

Lost and Found Story

There are always stories behind my short stories, but the one for A Window Table is the most mysterious because I “lost” the story for six months.

In early March 2024, I was working on a blog post to mark my fourth anniversary of Furious Fictions when I realised that August 2023’s story was missing.

I eventually found a copy of the short story, but as I wrote in the Lost and Found Story blog post, I didn’t recognise the plot or characters when I read it.

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Past Restaurant

Reading a story I knew must be mine but felt like someone else had written it was weird.

But the “DNA” proof that I’d written A Window Table was the restaurant in the first part of the story. I based it on a restaurant I booked for a date in my early twenties (forty years ago!) that also didn’t live up to its “good reviews”, like Bernie and Sally’s virtual restaurant in my short story!

© 2024 Robert Fairhead

Thanks to JamesDeMers for sharing the window table image on Pixabay.

N.B. Read A Window Table on Tall And True.