Café

Afternoon exhales its slow, reluctant sigh.
The café breathes rust and tobacco,
its wooden walls, once ribbed with laughter,
now shudder beneath the weight of ghosts.

Behind the counter she drifts –
a pale attendant of ashes,
her fingers circling porcelain rims
like bones arranged for ritual.
Bitter black, bitter cream,
each cup a conduit to days
already buried.

He waits alone, an architecture of dusk.
His eyes – furnaces of unspoken lament –
excavate marrow from her memory,
pressing a cold hand against
each faltering thought.
The air bends around him;
floorboards whine, walls lean closer,
the café cowers beneath his silence.

Her chest tightens, a wire about to snap.
The labyrinth of the past rises,
spooling its coils, whispering names
she thought dissolved by youth.
Shards return – brittle, sharpened,
polished in secret shame –
prowling the aisles like knives unsheathed.

His shadow lengthens across splintered wood,
a leviathan sliding through a door ajar –
not flesh, not bone,
but sorrow incarnate,
the residue of debts unpaid.

She wonders if the café’s dim light
can resist the slow crawl of night,
or if the darkness in his face
is only the mirror of her own.

Days repeat – grim litany,
sigh tangled with tremor,
cups and orders performed
in a hall of mirrors.
Every glance from his unwavering gaze
returns as time’s echo,
merciless, inescapable.

No specter wanders here,
no conjured phantom:
the horror is human, breathing,
grief in corporeal form,
memory’s iron clasp.

Still the shadow lingers,
caught in twilight’s shivering breath.
A name falters on her lips,
a face trapped in time’s cruel net.
The past will not release her –
its scream threads every waking dream,
a shadow moving through her blood.