Sketch 2

By: K. Harvey

There was a spot in the bookstore where four striped chairs faced each other. It was no place to read. No one shared anything but they all read together, telling each other what they read just by holding it in their lap. He wondered what the older people read. Sometimes he sat in the café. An old man, if he could, always sat in the same chair at the same table, facing the same direction and looking down at what he had in front of him on the tiny table. He wore sweatpants and many different plaid shirts. He wore big tinted glasses. His narrow eyes were right there behind the glasses. He must have read so much already. And he wasn't the business type. But he was reading very hard. He never looked up.

Such old men and women made him wonder. It couldn't be that there is always something new to discover. It wasn't that. He sat in one of those four chairs that faced each other and noticed when a very large old man sat down next to him. The old man sat a few books on his knee. The book on top of the stack was big, like an art book, and black. The old man was wearing a suit. But he wasn't the business type, because of the art book. He turned over the cover of the big black book and there wasn't any title. Just the silver embossed Playboy bunny. He started turning the pages one after the other after the other after the other after the other, like that. Like when a woman walks up the stairs on an escalator and its moving beneath her makes a pace that she can't break.