a small quiet

A shallow pool of muddy coffee sits cold on the bottom of the cup. Her hand circles the white of the mug in an absent sort of embrace – fingers loose and longing. A book is open on the dark, riveted wood of the table and her feet are crossed and tucked beneath the chair. Her eyes move slowly across the page in a familiar military rhythm of left right left right, so smoothly that the words become a stream of black, splashing ink carelessly as it runs up against the end of a sentence. She doesn’t mind the soggy page.

There is a baby boy near her. The tiny one sits in the lap of a man at the table to the right. His light brown beard is long and thick, and his eyes glimmer brightly beneath perfectly symmetrical eyebrows. He holds his son beneath the armpits and bounces him lightly on one knobby knee. The boy wriggles and squeals and lifts his pale, jam covered hands into the air.

The river of ink now increases its speed. It rushes across chapters, sinking into the dip of the book’s center and seeping onto the table. It pools around the white mug and the girl leans forward to dip the end of one of her curls into the perfect black. It comes out wet, the ink spiraling, creeping, climbing up and up. She straightens the curl with her right hand and guides the ends of the strand along the palm of her left.

It tickles like that time the boy whispered a secret into her ear on the grass in the shade of the park, when his hand brushed carelessly across the nape of her neck, when she woke up with him and the cool pale morning sun touched her cheek.

The ink begins to drip on the floor, splattering her brown sandals and adding dark freckles to her toes. She closes the book, and stands up. As she walks out of the café into the afternoon heat, she leaves a trail of black footprints, each a million muddy unspoken words.