Table For Three
written by: Jean Akintoye
She sat alone in a café
Somewhere up north,
The dusty windows peppered here and there
With Zeus almighty’s dandruff,
The wintry air chewing away at her flesh
Turning delicate silk skin
To coarse cotton
The ‘wood’ of the table
Staring up at her with a sort of absence
That you only see in wood
Or especially brain-dead teenagers.
She had requested a table for three
With the expectation that
Two of her friends might arrive
And share a mournful espresso with her
But an hour had come
Wasted away and
died
And the plastic seats
‘shining’ dullest blue
Seemed to look at her in
Silent judgement
As she stirred her brown concoction
With a frayed wooden rod
Till a phantom
In a grey veil that covered all but its mouth,
approached the empty seat and said
“Excuse me, but-
Is this seat taken?”
She answered,
“Yes”,
Untruthfully, of course –
And so the phantom sat down anyway.
It ordered nothing,
But simply sat there,
Admiring the dandruff-ridden windows
And the tasteless ‘wooden table’
And the dusty tiled floor.
Maybe she spared a thought to which alleyway
The phantom might have crawled out of
To end up in such a dingy little place.
Maybe she could have asked it where it hailed from
Or why it had come
Or why it refused to share
A mournful espresso
Maybe some part of her longed to peel back the veil
And see its sunken eyes
And bashed-in nose
And scarred-red skin –
Yet the words eluded her
And the phantom, too, remained silent.
Only breaking the peace to extricate
A frayed wooden rod
From its inner pocket,
And helping her stir
The brown concoction.
This might have lasted a century
Or a few seconds,
Before a second phantom entered the room.
Perhaps he was a man
Suit-clad and
Donning a scarf about his mouth
And he said nothing
Or maybe his scarf was just too thick
As he took the seat opposite her
And met her eyes of dullest blue
With his slashed, grey ones.
He waved down a waiter and
Ordered an Irish coffee.
And he sipped it mournfully
And watched her
Patiently
And the veiled phantom
As they stirred continually
Refusing to drink.
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