The boy in the corner of the coffee shop is reading three books at once.
He alternates between them
like he's dealing with his children and
trying not to play favorites, assessing them all equally and
giving each book the same amount of attention before
he carefully marks his place and moves on to the next.
His eyebrows are sparse, like someone glued
granules of pepper onto his skin at the place where they should be,
a tattoo that fills in the blank spaces, and
his lips curve down toward the floor,
like there are weights at the corners of his mouth,
landing him like a bookworm on a hook, and
he is wearing a baseball cap with a brim
that might as well be fresh from the hat-making factory, it's so flat.
He pushes that cap up between books to scratch his forehead.
The boy in the corner of the coffee shop is reading three books, too, and
when I glance up, he glances up, too, almost
as if he anticipated my movement and wanted to beat me to it.
It's too early in the morning for a staring contest. I look past him,
feeling picked bare already because the Book of Disquiet
is a manifesto on the art of depression and
"how to constantly wish to be someone you're not"
and I'm reading it cover to cover.
The boy in the corner of the coffee shop is scratching his forehead
underneath the baseball cap, putting
one finger against the flat-as-can-be brim to push it back and
then questing under the band for the itch.
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