Promenade

The table next to ours sits a woman and a child of perhaps seven. They did not talk much, as the lady was somewhat engrossed with her face. She kept taking her phone out of what looks to be like a designer bag, the kind of phone with the front camera that one can coddle one's systemic vanity with.  Once in a while she would bring out a cosmetic artifice, once a compact, then a lipstick. All this time she turns the camera phone on and off, adjusting her dyed-blond hair this way and that. Only once did I hear the child speak, saying "there's a fly on your food," waving his tiny hands over the plate. She did not appear to notice.