ESB

A man … he sits alone in the booth, a notebook open in front of him, writing with a pencil, lead dulled to a smudgy thick block. His words are short and slow in coming. It’s work for him, a slog to put words to thoughts that present themselves as sensations, smells or thick sounds in his mind. Writing is a translation of those brutal and rudimentary, those primitive mental movements, slow movements – and today he follows them, grabs them by the tail and pulls them into syllables, yanks them into formations others might recognize, twists and pushes them into phrases that barely make sense to him on the page – but he is careful and diligent that the translation is correct.

“What walked past was dark. I felt the cold of its shadow and wanted more of that cold. I was so warm. I was burning up with the heat of no one else. The cold felt good.”

His waitress is impatient. He drinks coffee and he smokes and his nails are dirty and his heavy flannel jacket is dirty and his eyes are muddied and she knows her tip will be the change from a dollar minus the eighty one cent coffee … and her disgust and disdain are palpable. She whines between his ears, tapping and scraping and he writes.

“I didn’t follow it. I didn’t know how with these feet I have. There are people looking at me so much and they hate me and I don’t know what I did wrong. I am just here and they don’t want me and I don’t understand. Her clicking looks make me warm, like an indian burn, just pressure and pushing and then pain that appears when I don’t expect it.”

Across the diner a child squeals with laughter and he looks up slowly. There is a change in his face, not a smile but a relaxing, an easing of the muscles in his jaw and a lifting of the eyebrows. The child’s mother meets his gaze and he snaps his eyes back to the notebook. There was fear in the movement, embarrassment and shame.

“I wish I had. Followed it. I wish I knew how I feel their eyes and am burned by them and still there is this movement in me that is cold. Someday maybe I will follow. Someday maybe I will rest myself next to that cool and feel good. I think maybe it is me that I saw. What if there is some of me they cannot burn?”

The wood of the pencil scrapes the paper at the curve of the question mark and he is done. He will not, would not, ask the waitress for a pen. He looks at the notebook for a moment and sighs acceptance. It seems right to end.

He drops a ten dollar bill on the table, remembering his mothers sore feet after her long shifts serving truckers cheap beer, remembering counting out change to buy candy after school. After, the waitress still hates him, and she doesn’t know why either. Nobody knows.