The Café Story

The man walked into the café. His legs walked and his arms walked by his sides and his feet walked below him and the floor moved beneath him and he sat down and the chair froze under his weight and once seated his hands steadied his head between their palms before soon all was collapsed onto the table. Head, elbows, arms and hands and the table held them all up. Shoulders became mountains overlooking ears and a small pasture of hair, grazed at by only tiny insects and the occasional nit. His neck stretched out or in, the bridge between a man and his body and he thought about a story he had been told about once that was only the description of the movements of a hand, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez he thought. Sitting like this, his forehead kissing the hard wood table he wandered, could he write like this? Could he write? Or was he only an imaginary writer who, whilst walking down escalators in tube stations thinks up sentences in his head with nowhere to write them down, fully formed phrases lost. Is everyone a writer like this? Not of less value but simply less productive. Ill oiled machines on the brink of bursting or exploding, thinking of the words they will write as they fall asleep and writing none. Watching television, noticing the gaps between the people on the screen. Drawing outlines in their minds whilst poetry runs through their heads and a car smashes into something on TV where things break and people die and drown and scream and laugh and the man walks into the café.

The chairs stand quietly. One or two of them pushed out at angles from when the last person to sit on them left, some occupied by anonymous bodies who sit their bums down where just moments ago someone else's bum was and some are fat and some thin.

And the chairs stood around the table like eager slaves waiting to be used.

The man orders a cup of coffee. He does not really want one but likes the idea of ordering one, finds it poetic. A black coffee and he is reminded of his father. The coffee comes quickly and he adds two spoons of sugar, again for poetic value, one would have been sufficient and he stirs and is stirred by his exquisite execution of what could almost be, he thought, a work of art. The simple ordering of a coffee because of the way it sounds and the adding of not one but two sugars for aesthetics. His sacrifices moved him and he poured in some milk from the little porcelain jug that the waiter had left on the table. It was so white inside that jug. Then as indifference dripped from the ceiling the man buried his face in his hands for protection.

He put down his cup; he felt better and started to think about his day. He got out his notebook and wrote some dates in rows and proceeded to cross off the ones that had already passed until he was left with what remained. Then he put it away.

He thought about the walk he would take back to where he had come from, waking up in the morning and going to sleep again at night.

Outside darkness had already begun to creep around the corners. It clung to the buildings, dodging the street lamps and the houses swelled with warmth. The people coming into the café took off their coats to shake off the night and hung them up to forget. Other men and women came in. A man laughed, he was a funny man and his friends laughed too because they knew he was funny and a grin stretched across his face like a half moon full of teeth and he shook hands with some other man and kissed a woman's hand and the group went to sit at a table.

The man fiddled with his spoon, studying his reflection in the metal.

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