Old Man
by
James Seamarsh

Every morning the old man would walk into the café. “Hot chocolate; in a glass,” he would say. He sat in the corner. I didn’t notice him, until one day I noticed he was gone.

“Where’s the old man?” I ask the waitress.

“What old man?” she says.

“The one that orders hot chocolate; sits in the corner?”

I point. The waitress follows. She stares at the empty chair. She turns back to me. Her eyebrows wrinkle with a question, which she does not ask. Instead, she says, “Don’t know,” and smiles. “What’ll you have?”

I try to remember him. I close my eyes and see him sitting there…

He is balding, combs his hair straight back. He has a gray, almost white beard, trimmed short. His eyes are dark blue, edged in deep wrinkles that only come from a lifetime of smiling. But it is a previous life. He is not smiling. He sits, eyes closed, sipping his chocolate.

“I’ll come back,” the waitress says. I open my eyes and watch her walk away.

Sadness swells, crashes, then cramps my heart. “He died,” I say, closing my eyes, overcome with grief.

I see him, lying alone in a small room, unnoticed. He died in his sleep, awakened briefly by the crushing weight in his chest. Unable to move, he watched the ceiling fade away. He shook and twitched as blackness took him and he disappeared.

I push back the loneliness and open my eyes. The waitress is standing there.

“Ready to order?” she asks.

“Yeah. Hot chocolate. In his honor,” I say, jerking my head towards the corner. She looks at me, then at the corner, and shrugs.

“Anything else?”

“No, thanks.”

I close my eyes.

The old man lived alone. He rented a room in a cheap hotel. The room was empty, except for a bed and a painting on an easel, that was angled to catch the light from the only window. The painting showed a man on a bed in a small room, with a painting by the window.

“Too fucking weird,” I mumble.

I pull out my sketchpad and do a quick drawing of the old man’s room. I put the perspective from the ceiling, in the back corner, opposite the window, looking down. The light from the window fades quickly. The back of the room is dark. The painting in the room is turned so it catches the light and can be seen from the bed. The old man is in the bed, dead, mouth open, eyes staring into the next world.

With a clunk of glass on wood, the waitress puts down the hot chocolate. “Here ya go,” she says. She moves closer to look at my drawing. “You an artist?”

“Yes,” I say. I lean back a bit, letting her see the whole picture.

“Is that the old man?” she asks.

“Yeah.”

“Is he dead?”

She turns her head towards me. I keep staring at the drawing, hoping she will keep looking at me. My heart is pounding. My breath is trapped in my chest.

“Yes,” I whisper.

Afraid she will leave, I turn to see her.

She doesn’t turn away. She has blue eyes, outlined with black make-up, a small nose that flows down to full lips. Her lips stir me. I look up at her eyes, then back at her lips. She cocks her head.

“I wish I’d known him,” she says.

I watch her lips move. I hear the sounds. The words float out and pop, like bubbles, against the wall that protects me. I imagine she is whispering, and let the words tickle my ears. She smiles. The corners of her mouth curve up, leading me back to her eyes.

I swallow hard, breath in. “What time you get off?” I say, ending with a squeak, like a balloon run out of air.

Did I really say anything? My ears are filled with the beat of my pulse. She looks at me, going from eye to eye, searching…

“Eleven,” she says, then moves on to another table.