Bellboy

Bellboy

Susan and her unremarkable friend—visitors from there, here. Ambitious adventurers in the form of light lock hair and paper cup, plastic lid. Listless wanderers collecting silver leaves, collecting unopened maps and chamomile teas. They curve in the wind like crescent moons.

            Susan’s friend points, her pointing finger poking at least one hole in the air. “Look there, Susan—under the pine—there’s the bellboy.”

            He’s shut-eyed and chapped-lipped, conifer cones clinging to his cloak. He came over from the metro but belongs here where glow-in-the-dark stars fade and fall from the ceiling onto the backs of his dusty eyelids. His shoes are dusty too, from places he cannot go or come from—the golden graham coast, the orchard, the whole lot of life uncontained in a capsule.  

            Dust is elegant.

In the earliest and whitest of lily robe dawns, Bellboy sets out a vat of crystal water. He carries apple orchards on his back and hoists lighthouses under his eyebrows. He stands straight and solitary, stomping outside in the largest, dustiest storm puddle . . . . wiping down weathered shoes with rainwater.