storied

My cafe neighbours read their coffee grounds in guttural and fabulous voices. They toss fate from demitasse to demitasse. There are people who draw curiosity to them humbly as flame draws moths; they are garbed in archaic adjectivery as quilts in cloth. I could go on and on. And as I bring them to the page, it is as though they are mine. More and more. How long have I been this way, with the brimming loneliness of a dispossesed storyteller? Forever. I record people and the worlds they fill, lamplight-like; I record the shadows they cast into and against each others' light.