A Gargoyle on Tuesday

by Marie Lecrivain

An iced latte sweats in front of me as I read Virginia Woolf’s A Haunted House. The ghostly couple drift from room to room and reminisce of bygone days as the first three cervical bones in my neck are gently tugged down. The staccato bass in Madness’s “Our House” beats a concave echo into my cerebellum as the next four vertebrae are bent into submission. My left eye shields the tingling after-burn from the Morton Girl’s bright yellow comet tail branded on an industrial size bag of salt propped against a tower of supplies that were left unattended by baristas busy with caffeine addicts. The constant ebb and flow of customers to my right brush against my retreating elbow as I futilely attempt to write a poem in my journal where the ‘e’s are transformed into “c’s,” “s’s,” and “&s.”

My head rests on my chest at a thirty-five-degree angle where I am forced to intercept side long glances from a fashionable silver-haired wraith who punctuates this invasion of my privacy with hastily written notes in the margin of the next great action film screenplay and a series of calls to his agent on a Razor phone. At 9:00 p.m. EDT a hip young denim-clad mother suckles her baby under a sky-blue micro fiber blanket. My vision is filled with Woolf’s trees, which have spun darkness for a wandering beam of sun. I am a pair of hunched shoulders, stone thumbs desperate to tack down fluttering pages, bulging eyes, and un-slung jaw with a mouth forced open wide for a flood of words that will never come.