At Onyx Coffee

by Erin Renee Noehre

The first man walks around the side of your body, languids into the coffee shop chair, and pushes the table made of “reclaimed wood” (is it reclaimed or is it just a side-swiped trunk of a tree?) out so he can rest his torso on the butt of the chair and sprawl his legs over the table. It’s these small and simple actions you must make noticings of all day. How this man sits. Pressed open. Expanding. His chest puffed and legs spread wide. You sit in the chair upright. Hands folded on lap. Small. Body stilled. Eventually, you chance a direct look at the man. When your eyes meet, his are already erupting with defense. You were surprised he was watching you, waiting for a reaction. Eyes sharp and cold with expectation. So, you (more immediately than you mean to) look away. Go back to your work. Make mental notes on how to avoid this weary. Throughout the hour you are there together, you look up and gaze out the window behind his head twice. And every time, he meets you with the same sharpness. The same brutally open body. The same eyes. Cold. Sharp. You are in the South. So it’s at least a little right for you to make some assumptions about him. From what he is wearing, his posture—the man might’ve held a torch in Charlottesville. Might have screamed alt-right-isms until the car plowed through the protestors. You guess he was raised by people who either competed your ancestors or owned them. And somehow nothing, not the looks he shoots your way or how his eyes boil your body down to nothing, ever seem enough to assume that the man is racist. Nothing is enough to assume that the man, by existing, by these efforts to make himself more than you, may be part of what contributes to the local and global deficit making survival such difficult work for the people you love. This is called birthright. His God-Given Right. This is his Power. So when the gaze like glass (if glass could be angry) meets you—you look away. Every time. Afraid and ashamed. A friend joins the man. The space they take up together outnumbers you. 700 white persons have walked by you today. 14 Black and you have noticed them all. After the contention slips you realize you have shifted yourself. Tried to decide that, at the very least, you may be a desirable woman. To the man. To combat the man’s hatred. You imagine the man thinking himself not good enough for you. Imagine he is annoyed, rather, by your short dress, the afternoon-light fluttering over your chest. How he could fool himself into a puddle at your feet, how you could take and press a dark heel straight through. This desire for his desire is not benign, you have loved mostly white-boys. Sweet ones though, not like this. Yet death or gawking never made you resent them any less; so how could love? When the man starts getting up to leave, his friend smiles. Holds up his laptop to show something to the glass-eyed man. They smile at each other. And though you are trying not to—you look too. Stuck to its front is a message in bold white-lettered print. A sticker which reads “FACTS DON’T CARE ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS” Out of the corner of your eye, you feel the glass-man’s friend look to you. Still smiling. Waiting for you to be offended. Waiting in a way that is also hoping. You realize the desires you have for each other are the same. One waiting for the other to press send & ignite finally the air you’ve barely allowed to hold the other all this time. The firelight flickers in Charlottesville. Your eyes swallow the gasoline. And you have to wonder, have to ask yourself, if the man knows there is no greater fact than that feeling. The one which tells you that you are in danger.

Erin Renee Noehre is an MFA candidate in creative writing at Arizona State University. She has served as Co-Artistic Director for the Borderlands Reading Series and received fellowships from the graduate college at Arizona State University as well as the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing. Her work has been featured in Pidgeonholes and Sonora Review.