The explanation was simple, her thoughts brought her outside. They were little nothings, bits of cotton, rolling into snowballs of increasingly hollow design — a faux psychology. Full of manys and nones. Lopsided smiles, last-minute errands.
Outside they dispersed like whispers. Whoops, gone. Their stories, there for one last second, evaporating in the sickly breath of the alleyway. In, wheeze, out. The brick was faded, tattooed with graffiti, the signature of missing fathers.
There was a man leaning against one of the brick walls. The term cool seemed to steam from him like morning dew greeting dawn. He was a snake with legs with his S-shaped posture, black holes for eyes, and sleepy eyelids that opened and closed like slow-motion accordions. His arms were foreign languages that he fought to translate, but his fingers were dexterous enough as they sculpted a cigarette — the paper coiling into a funnel of tobacco.
She was simpler, the Camel between her fingers already born. One second, then her lighter nipped at the air with its naive dance, the flicker bending and performing for the alleyway’s dying respiratory. Out, gasp, in. She sucked in the illusion, the exhale a release of her being. She admired the ashy ghost.
“Do you know why we’re here?” the man coughed, a crippled smoke ring climbing the brick.
“No,” she sighed, deep inhale.
“I don’t either,” he breathed, closing his serpent eyes.
There were little details that she retraced in the scene, like random, unnoticeable discrepancies in penmanship, her eyes running so many laps over them, shelving them one by one by one. Except they were absences, and invisible things — forgotten by the artist. The songbirds that weren’t there, the missing texture of another’s skin, the names not yet carved in the alley walls, the thoughts never spoken, the fizzling cigarette corpses after a silent conversation.
So many nothings that became somethings until she realized that the moment was a poem, if even imagined, writing itself as easily as a breath, floating in and out, like the unfurling, mystic phantoms of smoke between her half-numb lips.
“I never did understand coincidence,” coughed the man.
“Neither did I. Maybe it’s just the result of a screwy universe.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. But it’s good to see you again either way.”
“Sure.”
The man was silent, absorbed in the capsule of gray he launched from his nostrils. Until it gathered around him, in industrial accuracy, the soft explosions rippling around where he stood, carrying him away just like before. Then the smoke cleared and it was as if he had never been there at all.