I sit sometimes in coffee shops or restaurant barrooms at the end of the night transcribing the notes of the day from thought to paragraph. And this time a woman sat beside another woman and spoke of someone else.
She said he felt roughly the same. His skin hadn’t changed, but now he had muscles. And it had been decades, DECADES she stressed, since they last held each other. I was getting drunker and drunker with her talk. It wasn’t a conversation. It was her time to speak of this thing that grew in her and the man she hadn’t seen for so long.
She spoke eloquently enough, only peppering her words with pauses and wordless sounds to elongate them the right amount of time for her brain to catch and fire on another aspect of it.
It would never work, she promised herself, but those arms of his. She drifted into the doorway, sipping her drink, descending into the dream of night.
By Hank Cherry
