Discourse and Desires

“You’ve met someone, haven’t you?” Tracy says.

You flag down the barista.  “No. Well . . . yes, I have, but it’s not like that.”

Your friend leans in, her elbows on the table.  “Do tell.”

And so you do.

You got tired of feeling the weight of his attention on you every time you were in the café, which was a lot.  So one day, you looked up and caught him staring at you from behind his curtain of greasy fringe.  That was when you stood up, grabbed your coffee and your paperback book with the tattered pages and loose spine, and walked over to him.

He sat at a table in the far corner, away from the entrance—his table.  When he saw you, maneuvering through the sparse late-afternoon crowd of business suits, he jerked his head downward as if to hide.  But dark, dingy yellow lights did little to hide him from you; he stuck out like a tap dancer in a ballet recital.  His knees started to bounce frantically. 

He wasn’t cute, not in the traditional sense.  His ensemble was unfortunate; its motif, misguided.  And he used his hair to hide his face.  Even as you sat down at his table and leaned over it, you couldn’t make out the color of his eyes.  He closed his journal and covered it with folded hands, one on top of the other.

You gave him your name.  He mumbled his.  Seth, he said, and you immediately thought of snakes, and Egyptian gods, and that character in the story you want to write—the one about the Demon Childe who turned out to be not a demon child at all, really. You engaged in a futile attempt to strike up conversation, and he looked at you behind his fringe with a stare that reminded you of a dry-erase board, fresh out its packaging. 

And there you were without any markers.