Mabon
On University Avenue, overlooking 42nd Street. It’s light evening. From my window, I can only see the bottom half of new students checking maps, of bar humpers lumoxxing in meandered footfalls, of coeds and Chinese herbalists, of bike messengers and policemen. I see breasts and waists and moving feet and the occasional glance upward through the crack, the occasional iris against glass.
The way the buildings are aligned reminds me of perspective drawings in high school, the soft whish of carbon pencils across manila. This is how I would draw them even now, I think. High, low, high. Little windows up top, bigger ones below. Throw in a steeple or an awning and pepper it with landscaping or sidewalk fencing or hash-table doors.
And in my city, the people would have stick legs and arms of uneven lengths. The women would wear triangle dresses and bows in their hair and the men would wear bowler hats. All feet would turn outward and nobody would have a face, just a lopsided circle for a head and perhaps some spiky hair. And they’d keep walking one after the other, on and on without tiring, without end.
There are empty tables around me and muted music over the speakers. Indian sauces mix in the near-between and pester my nose. The chai is spicy and thick and it comes up to my lips to rest there in an eggshell mug. There are no humans outside my window now, only sketch marks and noise. I start counting cadences, making up stories.
The darkness has begun to spread across Seattle and the rains have returned. At night, the refrigerator-breath comes down from the mountains and the spiders curl into the corners and the ravens curl into their feathers and we are single-digit weeks until the end of the year.
There is an exhalation of ghosts.
The white flesh of a faded scar shines across my arm.
I am tired.
I ran it through a plate glass door when I was young because I couldn’t wait to see cartoons. I cried and bled on the stoop in midsummer, in the heat burst of windshields, in the pungency of tomato plants, in the honey bees bedecking melted shafts of half-eaten orange sherbet. And it’s these scars that are visible again, the same ones I move gently with my finger imagining glass claws and tardy animation.
If we are tired, it is because we have been beaten by meat fists and laid into dirt grooves. If we are frightened, it is because we have been given artificial teeth and asked to chew through cornfields. If we are angry, it is because we are angry.
Me, I’m still here.
As he comes in the door, smiling, wet with mist, I start laughing immediately. The lights go up in the restaurant and the window blackens to reveal nothing in reflection but our conversation, white tablecloths, and folded hands.
