She sits across from me, one hand in her lap, the other on her half-emptied cup of coffee. Her gaze is distant, foggy like the harbor just outside the window.
I say, “What was it about time travel?” My own hands, on the table in front of me, left over right, seem too big. Like monsters at the ends of my wrists, they lay there in gargantuan heaps, hairy and warm. I lift them up and my fingers leave temporary circles on the table. I set them down again.
She says, “When something calls your name, you listen.” Her sentence fades and my attention dawdles out the window. A man stands under a streetlight, trying to light his pipe, but the air is too wet and his match goes out three times before he succeeds. I can see his outline, defined by quick bursts of the tiny flame. When the tobacco catches, he lets out a puff of smoke and he is gone. There is no distinction within the smoke and the fog. They are one now and the man has vanished.
I remember I was listening when she stops talking to take a sip of her coffee. Setting the cup down, she continues. “And when you don’t listen, sometimes they have to catch your attention.” At this point, I wish I had been paying attention. I can’t tell if she is extending the metaphor or making a statement about my attentiveness.
“Could you say that in plain English?” I ask. She laughs.
“Since when have I spoken English?” I try to make my face look like a smile, but it’s uncomfortable and obviously insincere. She notices and her own smile fades.
We fall into quiet again and she takes a packet of sugar from the pile. Friction pulls several packets with hers and they float upwards gracefully, set into a slight spin. She pushes them to the table, then rips her own packet and dumps the sugar into her coffee and stirs. The metal spoon clinks on the inside of the mug, making asymmetrical chimes that draw me in. I watch the tiny whirlpool in the brown-black liquid and I’m mesmerized. Bubbles are drawn to the center of the mug and, slowly, the clinking fades. The noise is gone.
I narrow my eyes and look around. That’s not the only noise that’s gone. The rest of the tavern has gone quiet. People are walking about, their footsteps missing and the rustle of clothing gone from the air. A group of friends clink glasses noiselessly and their howled toast is merely a soft breeze of simultaneous breaths. I look to my companion and she, too, has raised her eyes to look around the room. With furrowed brow, her gaze lands and I look to follow her eyes.
A woman has entered, her skin like a pale lily and her eyes as white and void as pearls. Her head is shaved and her white robes flow around her as though she were underwater. When she takes a step, the wooden floors mold around her bare feet as though she were walking through sand. I look back to my companion to see her say something and, though I can’t hear her words, I know she whispers the woman’s name.
“Silence.”
The woman comes to us and looks at my companion and then me. Her lips do not move as she speaks and no sound reaches my ears through the stillness.
“We should go,” she says. There is a ripple in the air. I see the tavern fold around us and, quite suddenly, we are gone.
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