Sunrise
Burger

I work nights. When most people are eating breakfast, I am eating dinner, and I always assumed nobody had ever designed a menu for that. It turns out somebody has.

I came straight from a twelve-hour shift, still in scrubs, with a friend from the unit who swore that putting would reset my brain. She was right. There is something about reading a green at nine in the morning, crouched low, watching the slope fall away toward the cup, that quiets everything else. On hole 6 at PopStroke Katy, a curling right-to-left putt, I made it from twenty feet and nearly cried.

At the turn we stepped off to the patio and I ordered the Sunrise Burger. When it arrived, I nearly cried again.

A single smashed burger patty, thin and serious. American cheese draped over it like a warm blanket at the end of a long night. Bacon, because a morning deserves it. And crowning the whole thing, a fried egg, bright as the name promises. Tater-tots on the side, piled up like a reward for showing up.

It is a breakfast burger. It is a dinner burger. It is both, and it does not apologize.

I ate every bite. Then my friend and I went back out for the back nine with the sun on our backs, slow and happy and half asleep.

At home I pulled the blinds, set the scorecard on my nightstand and slept like a birdie dropping clean into the cup.