TAKE FIVE

I took five at Take Five.
They said where and when the meeting would be and I was there, then, and couldn’t find it, like it’s my fault the jeans don’t fit.
‘Are you here for the meeting?’ I asked a man’d been talking to a woman about where it might be.
He looked at me as if I’d offered him a blow job and got it horribly wrong. ‘No,’ he said, shook his head, backed off, joined the woman and they walked out the Canteen together.
I looked out from the steps of Hamilton House, there was no one form last time we’d met that I could see so I went next door to Take Five and took five with a coffee.
‘I’ll bring it out to you,’ he said, the man behind the counter serving when I said after paying I’d be outside. ‘In a mug,’ he said.
‘Thanks,’ I said waving before taking the front door out to a table and a seat from where I could see two women sat talking outside Zazu’s.
What do they think when they see me here? Anything? Nothing at all? Not even, ‘There’s a lonely man.’

IN

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A HINGED DOOR

‘What did you say?’ he said.
‘It was mostly what I didn’t say,’ I said.
‘That all?’
‘Well no,’ I said. ‘Closing the front door behind me.’
‘What happened?’
‘I took some rubbish out to the bin and she was in her front garden or yard as it is more like,’ I said.
‘What was she doing?’ he said.
‘Sweeping, she had a broom.’
‘Oh.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and she said something about the way the street looked and I said, “Lovely.”’
‘“Lovely?”’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘“Lovely.”’
‘That it?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I said, “Lovely,” then went back inside but not before a very awkward silence where I could’ve said something.’
‘Why didn’t you say something?’
‘No words came to me to speak,’ I said. ‘It was like for moment not having any thoughts then your head fills with a scream at the sudden realisation and terror at the emptiness. I couldn’t bear it.’
‘So you went back in the house?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And it one of those times when you know that what you’re doing is significant as you’re doing it.’ - a pause as I recall the moment, oh yes, there it is – ‘I knew that as I was closing the door behind me something significant was happening because I was closing the door behind me.’
‘You mean…?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘On the seed of a future the flower of which I, nor anyone else, would ever know.’
‘A future unhinged,’ he said. ‘By the closing of a hinged door.’