5/19/11

He Leaves Tea
By Melissa Chichester


She dips the scone in her chamomile tea, and the crumbs drown, tumbling to the bottom of the teacup, mingling with escaped leaves from the steep. Alma brings the scone to her lips, recognizing buttermilk, or is it sour cream? She pauses and furrows her brow, tasting her lipstick too. Ah, well, she thinks. Let me eat my lipstick.
It is raining outside, as it does in movies when something bad is happening. And something bad is happening. Alma sits at the window table of the cafe; the table with the checkered peach tablecloth, the fabric under a glass slab of tabletop. Her legs are crossed, her toenails manicured and clean, and her skin is smooth. Alma still has good legs, shapely and strong, at fifty and some change.
But I still love him, illogically. Alma exhales, as though she is blowing the words out of mind. She sits at this cafe to watch him, Luke, her construction worker who is standing tall on a height of scaffolding just across the street. He is wearing a gray t-shirt and a green hardhat. His figure is blurred due to distance, but Alma sees all she needs. The rest of his image is heavy, immovable dust, crowding her cranial folds like blindness. It has been four days since he changed the locks, yet Alma still regaled the key as diamonds, or the rare and valuable painite gemstone. He is a rare mineral too.
The rain makes me invisible, she decides, and this thought is a small victory in break-up recovery. Maybe this is a step. Be invisible in the rain. Discard keys. Eat until the plate is empty. Full stomach, empty mind. Alma bites hard into the scone again, a bite too large for her mouth. She chews, lips parted, still wet with tea. My tongue is dry. Alma nearly laughs at this average thought, and how quickly passion arrives and departs, not unlike the empty teacup and the plate, littered with crumbs.


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Then type a little about you, a biography no longer than three lines. Melissa Chichester lives and writes in rural Michigan with her husband, three dogs, and three cats. Her work has been published in Red Weather, Animal Wellness, and the Pank magazine blog.