Lunch Hour

She only truly exists in the half shadows, the interstitial territory between reality and Faerie. She's a programmer for an actuarial company in Providence. On her lunch hour she walks to a nearby park, where she eats homemade falafel.

If you just looked at her you'd see an earnest young professional woman, quiet, modestly-dressed, solitary, aloof. If you looked at her and actually saw her, you'd see her as she truly is. And if you saw her as she truly is, the buildings of Providence would turn transparent and fade away like pale wisps of white smoke. The park benches would reveal themselves as stelae of green-veined marble, delicately etched with symbols that tickle at the contours of your memory and seem almost, almost, almost intelligible. Birdsong, muted by the cough of diesel bus motors and the incessant hum of traffic, would become perfectly mellifluous and so absolutely clear that the sound of it would resonate through the bones of your jaw. If you truly saw her, the smells of the small city park...exhaust fumes layered over french fry grease and the post-nasal stink of pesticides...would dissipate and the air would be filled with the scent of something not-quite-jasmine and not-quite-lilac. And she herself would be clad in tribal garb and painted with pallid, aboriginal daubs. The Roberta Chiarella barrettes in her hair would be transformed into ornately plaited leafs and feathers.

But to see her as she truly is, you must use a different set of eyes. Your eyes must be much much older, or much much younger. Then, when her lunch hour ends and she walks back to her office building and to her fourth floor computer station, you could see that on the bench where she ate her falafel lies a single peacock feather.

posted by greg @ 4:09 PM