Antony Hitchin
Conversation in a Café
‘I’ve missed you’ she says,
fingers fondling a glass of steaming coffee, glass coloured caramel, reflecting a chequered red and off-white table cloth covered in plastic, easy-wipe down, yet sticky to the touch.
There is a faint smell of disinfectant in the air and I wonder what we’re doing here and why there is a solitary wilting daisy in an egg cup between us.
Eggs pop into burning hot pans, a fire-alarm goes off,
she sits silently, scrutinising me for a response. Waiting patiently, hanging
on words yet unformed. A dusky paragon of beauty surrounded by burning fat and sausage smoke,
like some crude juxtaposition of opposites. A photographic spread that’s meant to be ‘modern’ and cutting-edge.
Still I’m wondering what we’re doing here and what could possibly have brought us to this place,
while all around me people leisurely pour sugar like water into tea cups and chew sausages and dribble egg yoke.
‘Really I have’ she says,
words saturated with sincerity, her right hand closing over mine as if it could deliver me and I think of the email attachment she sent me, a jpeg image of nothing other than her neck, white ivory, soft and slender, a single black hair stroking her throat.
