Also, here's an update on the story from last week. I'm not totally sure where it's going, but I'm really happy with the prose and the beginnings of characterization.
I met Chelsea in a café outside a train station in
downtown Manhattan. It was still early in the day and we were the only two
customers in there. She’d ordered black coffee and she was stirring it slowly,
looking up to the door every so often like she was waiting for someone to
arrive. She had long hair pulled back in a ponytail and wide impatient eyes,
the kind of eyes that made every man pretend it was his face they were looking
for and that when they finally settled on him she would blink a couple of times and
say ‘there you are’, with a sardonic smile and maybe a wink.
I asked the
waitress for my flat white and took a seat a couple of tables away from her. I
spread my papers around me like I always did, but it was purely customary. I
couldn’t have concentrated that morning. For some two weeks by then my mother
had been coaxing me back home in calculating hints about her health, and it
seemed the more I determined to stay in the sin and squalor of my current
milieu, the more arguments she had to draw me out of it. That morning it was
cataracts. The world was going fuzzy at the edges, she told me. She was worried she’d
fall down the stairs.
The
waitress brought me my coffee and I sipped it immediately without waiting for
it to cool, burning my tongue and causing me to cry out. I saw Chelsea staring
at me across the room with a curious expression that she turned to a
self-conscious smile when she briefly met my eyes. She looked down again, as
did I. But I could still sense her eyes on me after I’d looked away. I could
see the slight movements of her head in the corners of my vision.
When I
sipped at the coffee a second time and found it still too hot, inhaling sharply,
I heard her chuckle, a soft noise like a confirmation of a suspicion to
herself, not genuine amusement at all. I looked up at her sternly but she
raised her eyebrows and smiled.
‘You know
what they say about flat white drinkers, don’t you?’ she asked. The event of
her voice startled me and I stuttered something meaningless in lieu of
replying. She waited a moment for me to offer something more profound, and when
I didn’t she smiled again and said ‘flat, white people.’
I must have
looked affronted because she laughed then and picked up her cup and came and
sat across from me.
‘I’m just
kidding, sweetheart,’ she said, crossing her legs and leaning back in the
chair. ‘Don’t look so serious.’
I watched
her for a minute, expecting her to ask something about my papers, or at least
acknowledge them with her eyes, but they never left my face, even to look down
at her own coffee, which she still stirred.
‘What do
they say about people like you?’ I asked. I was quite proud of myself for a
moment, until I saw a flicker of something like indignation cross her face and
I realized what she thought I’d said.
‘I meant
your coffee,’ I said hurriedly. ‘Black, is it?’
‘That’s
right,’ she said, regaining her cool demeanor so quickly that I doubted I’d
seen it crack at all.
Yez. More to come shortly.
