Lately, Lucie woke with the ability to hear the thoughts of strangers. Restaurants and buses were the loudest places. No one said what they meant, but they thought it awfully loud.
Now, waiting at a table among a crowd that said nothing true of itself, Lucie shifted slightly to the left, uneasy in the space between what was said and what wasn’t. She reached for one of the cloth napkins, folded like a half clamshell. Sunlight passed through the window, through her wine, and into her. The inside of her forearm turned a translucent merlot, and she held it there, waiting for her someone to unfold the other napkin across from her.
Heat traveled up through her shoulder and into the back of her neck. She shivered in the narrow space between hot and cold where she thinned into nothing. It was warm almost all the time now. Even in Boston, the sky was glazed with smoke from Canadian wildfires. People took photos of the yellow sky and hazed sunsets, posted them for their beauty, and said nothing of the earth on fire.
But right now, she wasn’t thinking of that. Instead, she listened to everyone’s thoughts around her, loud and suffocating like an invisible smog indoors. Lucie was suffocating. And she surmised that everyone around her was privately suffocating, too, and saying nothing of it. Looking up, she found herself fixed on a man with a shadowed face from his large ballcap. He unfolded a creaky ladder by the hostess stand and climbed up with a heavy looking box of tools dangling from one arm. With the other arm, he pushed a ceiling tile straight up with ease and began fixing something Lucie probably didn’t understand. But a man with a pastel Vineyard Vines shirt in the corner Lucie’s right was thinking, his thoughts particularly louder than the rest, and she couldn’t help but listen as his mouth spat words about fourth quarter financials while his inner-world cried for a wife, and kids, specifically two, a boy and girl. That would make him feel whole. A traditional family. It didn’t matter the earth was on fire. He wanted a family. Lucie could hear his fantasy of opening the door to be greeted with the joyful commotion of when children miss someone.
Wishing, for some reason she didn’t know yet, that the sunlight would shift to his table and coat him in the escapable warmth to make him shiver, suspending him for a moment where he’d be nothing, too, she sighed, watching the man smile at his colleague and slice his bloody steak, chomping open-mouthed on a cut-off chunk pierced meat.
Shifting again to her left, Lucie tuned in to the woman who talked incessantly of her husband.
“I know it’s not me,” the woman said triumphantly. “But that makes me wonder what it is.”
Inside, the woman’s mind was wailing. A fire engine raced by the windows, blaring its horn and wailing its siren, too. Cars honked for everyone else around them to move aside. Despite the commotion, the woman’s mind didn’t stop.
I’m not pretty anymore.
He’s bored with me.
What’s wrong with me?
The woman across from her wailed inside, too.
Shut up. Why am I even here?
I need new friends.
This is probably the best I can do for a while.
Another voice sounded somewhere to Lucie’s right.
“Can we ask that server guy to pull the blinds down? I can’t see anything. And it’s way too hot.”
Again, for a reason she didn’t know yet, Lucie didn’t want the blinds pulled down. And again, she extended her arm beneath the merlot warmth, waiting, still, for her someone to arrive. She’d feel better to have company in all her shifting, just someone to make it bearable. But they were thirty minutes late.
She pulled her phone out of her purse, and among the clangs of silverware and glasses clinking, among empty chatter and the pollution of secret thoughts, of the parts where we all pray that the light never shines and the fires never flush out, Lucie texted her someone. I’m tired of waiting. Are you coming or not? Her someone began typing back, the three little dots, a flashing ellipsis that only ever gave her belly an internal burn as it signified more waiting, more unknowing, more stewing in her darkest places where, at the rate the sun was growing in the sky so fast and hot, she wouldn’t be able to hide any longer.
She waited with her phone out on the table for a minute longer, feeling similar to the space between hot and cold. Maybe he was rereading his apology text to make sure it was good enough. Maybe he was pausing, thinking of what to say that would be right.
But it was none of that. No one was coming for any of them.
Shifting again, landing somewhere in the middle of her seat, Lucie drank the rest of her wine, enjoying the warmth that spread inside her, and among the clangs of silverware and glasses clinking, among the empty chatter and the pollution of secret thoughts, she felt herself dissolve as floating ash up into the atmosphere. Everyone was tired of waiting. And everyone sat still, complaining of the blinds that were never pulled down, finished their meals, drank their drinks, and said nothing of themselves.
Lucie left shortly after she finished her drink. Walking past the hostess stand towards the door where the heat found its way inside, she stumbled over one of the man’s tools heavy on the ground, his head still up in the ceiling and now hers craned up, too, looking to fix something that she didn’t understand.
Allie Dixon is a Boston-based writer and artist whose work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, PRISM International, Ruminate, Writer’s Digest, and elsewhere. Her debut novel, represented by Trident Media Group, is forthcoming, and her visual work was recently featured in the Fay Chandler Emerging Art Exhibition at Boston City Hall.
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