Tea Party #17 ~ Fiction
Paz De La Calzada - All That Glitters Isn't Gold larger version
The Date | Shannon Gibney
Her friend left them then, and they talked for hours and hours—about how to pack meat so that the blood was completely contained inside its flimsy plastic bag, about how there were never enough ways to say anything the right way. She didn’t even know what she was saying when she was talking to him. She didn’t even notice that her chest was inches from his.
They were the second to last people to leave the party, and he said that he would call her. She had been talking so much and so long that she hadn’t had time to drink any of the punch in her glass. When she finally tasted it, she found that it was delicious. So she took it home and placed it on the top shelf of her refrigerator, where it stayed perched for many weeks.
He called her soon after that, and they agreed to meet for lunch at a small café in the neighborhood between the neighborhoods between them. She agonized over what to wear and decided that she would kiss him—slowly, on every place on his temple—when she saw him, and she wouldn’t even care who stared or even if he did not reciprocate. Men usually repulsed her, with their thick swaggers and the way they took up as much space as possible. He was the first man she had met who curved space around him when he moved, who changed the world by being in it, rather than trying to make it over and over again.
She arrived at the café early and took off her feathered hat and thick sweater. He arrived late, looking tired. His one curl frizzed down the center of his forehead, and his face was wet with perspiration. Before she could move to kiss him, he said, “I’m afraid I’m not a very good date today,” and she felt a whoosh of energy rush out of her spine.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, and he just shrugged. They ordered the soup of the day and salads, and when he lifted his hand to pick up his spoon, she noticed something quite alarming.
“Where is your pinkie?” she asked him. There were his thumb, his index finger, his middle finger and his ring finger, all poised and strangely bent as she had seen them before. But his pinkie was curiously absent. There was no stump, nor any blood. There was just the place where the digit had been.
He frowned. “I lost it.” He clutched the spoon harder.
“You lost it?” she asked. She did not understand.
He nodded. “I lost it. It happens sometimes.”
She could tell that he didn’t want to talk about it, so she let it go.
It wasn’t a bad date . . . but she didn’t feel anything like the way she had felt at the party, him not minding her forward-moving hand, their two skins becoming more brown and less yellow the closer they stood to each other. It’s almost like he’s not really here, said her stomach, and when she looked up across the table at him, he was suddenly gone.
“Where are you?” she gasped. But there was nothing. He was truly gone—his soup, half-eaten crackers and barely touched salad sitting in front of him. “You!” she shrieked, waving his name like a banner.
The wait staff looked at her alarmingly, so she quit speaking and just decided to sit until he returned from wherever it was he had gone. She sat there for three hours, ordering a new cup of tea every time a waiter looked at her suspiciously, like she was just sitting there to frighten away customers. She finally left when the sun was peeking through the lowest of the dead November branches, and walked slowly home.
“How was your lunch?” her friends asked her later, grinning knowingly.
She smiled awkwardly, not knowing what to say, how to explain the unexplainable.
She went to work, she walked her dog, she kept doing her exercises every morning and she kept on writing. The words came like they always did, which was a relief to her, but they still didn’t reveal the mystery of him. This was a disappointment. » next page »