APPETITE by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh (The New Yorker)

　　The first-person narrator is a cook. He wishes to have his payment raised, but fails to ask the manager for the raise. He was not a valedictorian in his school, just one of the many. He is teased by his friend, a taxi driver. An anorexic girl is newly employed for the restaurant. Cooks job is deadly busy. One rainy day, his umbrella is broken and when he is walking all drenched, the anorexic waitress picks him up in her car. She tells a riddle to him. It is about dead pilots in a cabin. At the end of the story she calls him “boy.” He pleases to be called a boy. “‘Pretty boy,’ she said. ‘pretty, pretty boy.’ ‘Really?’ I asked her. ‘Really?’” 　　The author depicts the narrator’s constant depressed feelings so well that the reader easily identifies him/herself with him. He is a loser in his life, just like Charlie Brown in Snoopy. The introductory sentence “Things were not going as I had hoped” symbolizes the whole story. The title, Appetite, is also excellent, because it shows lack of appetite or active attitude on the part of both the cook and the anorexic waitress. The English used in the fiction is not so complicated as in most of other short stories. 　　 （Saïd Sayrafiezadeh was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1968 and grew up in Pittsburgh.He is a writer of plays, essays, and fiction.）