I watched him fidgeting with his watch. She had stood him up. She was off somewhere, say, walking down the street to the corner store watching the city lights blur and shiver on the wet street, all reds and blues and greens rippling, and a sudden thought pops in her head that he must be sitting there, in this tiny cafe' wondering about her, then the thought is smothered. She has to get milk for the cat. She's left the stove on.

I watched him there sitting eyes sinking and then vanishing. Then I watched him get up. I paid for my drink.

A sudden clinking came from the man's pocket as he made it outside, getting louder as he walked faster, agitated, keys, maybe change, definitely anger. How many times has a woman stood him up? How underdeveloped are his social skills because she never comes, he's never allowed to exercise his vernacular and wit and charm? No vernacular. No wit. Charm evaporated. All gone.

Footsteps were gun shots. Hunched over giving only broad shoulders and the curve of his back. The pin stripes on his shirt bent out like the bars of a cage failing to hold a circus strong man. The keys, or the change, clinking were ricochets. As cars pass, the wheels whispered rumors and hissed and spewed water. A sprinkle on his pant leg, he didn't seem to mind.

He lived close by, turning the corner he pulled out his keys. They were keys. He struggled with his keys at the door perhaps because he was angry, hands shaky unlike mine.

Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's Man of the Crowd