One pizza. Four versions of Friday.
A kitchen table becomes the meeting place for four people who have had very different days.
An original fictional story. Characters and events are imagined.
The first arrival
Nina came home with a tote full of library books. Cal arrived next, still explaining a meeting to someone on the phone. Their upstairs neighbors appeared with a small salad and the news that their washing machine had finally stopped making its strange noise. Nobody had planned a dinner party. They had only planned to be hungry at roughly the same time.
The common ground
They ordered a vegetable pizza and made room on the table. There were four chairs, but one was doing important work as a laundry shelf. Cal moved the laundry. Nina found a plate that had been missing since Tuesday. The neighbors debated whether the salad needed its own bowl or whether the container already had a strong case.
A different kind of agenda
When the pizza arrived, the phone went face down. Conversation moved from work to books to the mysterious behavior of household appliances. One person wanted the corner of a particular slice. Another wanted to explain why the movie they had watched was better than its title suggested. No one tried to keep the evening on track.
The last slice
At the end there was one slice left and four elaborate offers to let somebody else take it. Nina divided it into smaller pieces. They ate standing around the kitchen counter, a final meeting with a very short agenda. By then Friday belonged to all of them.