And she smiled and he told her about how he skinned his knee when he was ten because it was the first thing that jumped into his mind and it seemed just about a million miles away from this and she asked him after he finished his story if he would mind driving her back to her place and he could come in if he wanted and he said he would and asked if she would mind if he sat on the bed for a bit because talking can tire a person out and then the talking was quieted as they pressed their lips together and laid on the bed and he closed his eyes and held her close to him to feel something close and to be happy about holding something living and warm and something that loved to be held and told that love was close and would not leave anytime soon and soon enough they both fell asleep under the covers and it was warm but comfortably so and in the morning when he woke up and saw her bathed in the filtered sunlight coming from the window, showing the frayed ends of her hair and the dust floating aimlessly in the air looking only for a place to land, he thought suddenly that this was the right light and she looked beautiful and he decided that he should tell her his name when she woke up and he laid back in the bed, draped his arm over her and felt her body move closer to his, without thinking, like an animal snuggling next to its mother for warmth.





She was supposed to meet him here. Half past twelve. Little hand and big hand making a perfect line. It was now a right angle. She was fifteen minutes late. He was nervous. The table he sat in front of began to tremor from the tapping he made with his fingers and with his feet. The fingers didn’t cause the tremor, although he supposed they added to it the way one voice joins to a sea of voices at a baseball or football game. One voice doesn’t really matter, but if every person, with one voice each, began to think that way then there would be no sea of voices and no home field advantage, and who would like to play in front of a hundred thousand silent people? Not fans, fans made noise, but people, still as statues and just as silent too. His foot was the determining factor in the tremor, it made the table wobble and shake a bit. The base of the table wasn’t even, he noticed that. If he made a table he would have to make it even, what was the point of making a table if it was uneven? Then it was just frustrating and annoying and you’d have to do so much work to get it even that it was better after all just to start over and make a brand new table.
    Twenty minutes late. He was prompt. Why shouldn’t she be too? He crossed his arms, but his foot continued to tap the base of the table and the table still continued to wobble and still annoyed him, and he began to wonder how much it cost them to make this particular table and all the similar tables adorning the rest of the coffee shop and what was the cost benefit analysis that had led them to conclude that it was better to send out a table with a wobbly base as opposed to making a brand new table that didn’t wobble whatsoever? He should probably write a letter to the CEO of that company. Maybe they put the maker of the table on the underside of the table. He’d check later. Next time he was here he would take a look. He couldn’t now. What if she walked in when he was looking under the table and didn’t see him and left or worse yet saw him and thought he was some kind of freak, some other kind of freak worse than the one she already knew him to be – deviant. Yes, he would check next time because he didn’t want that to happen and she might be here any time. She was late anyway, which was translated into English as meaning any minute now. And besides if she did show up he wouldn’t have time to look because if she did show up and things went as he hoped and as she had emailed him saying things would go then he wouldn’t be alone for the rest of the day and maybe the night. And he had to remember to set his alarm on his phone so that it would wake him up early enough in the morning so that he would remember to call work and tell them that he was sick and wouldn’t be in that day. Which was partially true. He was sick. He laughed. But he had to call an hour before he was supposed to be in which he thought was a terrible inconvenience to him and to his boss who surfed the internet for porn and for audio clips from famous movies to put on his phone as ring tones because it would wake him up and distract his boss so that he might accidentally put an audio clip from a porno onto his phone instead of Austen Powers yelling “Groovy Baby!” and next time the phone rang there would be the heavy breathing of a woman in deep ecstasy and his boss, red-faced would shut the phone off quickly and say he had no idea how that got there, and he didn’t want that to happen, but at the same time he did have to call in to work nonetheless because he just had to.
    Almost twenty minutes now and he looked around at the coffee shop wondering if she might possibly be here already. But no one matched her description. Had she lied? Was she really that sixty year old woman with blue white hair and a lapel pin that looked like a daisy with a ladybug astride? It was possible, no probable, that she had lied in some way. The picture was probably old. It was grainy and he could only tell that it was a woman. Nothing distinguishing. He had lied anyway and he understood how easy it was. Not his real name to begin with. No, something generic and forgettable. What was it? Oh, God, he had to remember the name that he had said belonged to him, but really belonged, he was sure, to someone else. Something like Hal. No it was Howard Parker. That was it. But that was a small lie. And then he had changed six inches into seven inches, but that was not important either. She wouldn’t notice. He didn’t notice unless he was looking out of mere curiosity, but when it came to action time, there was no time to think, much less notice and bring out a measuring tape.
    A woman opened the door. She matched the description, which was actually pretty generic. Five foot five, shoulder length brown hair, good figure. He could see a hundred girls like that on a college campus about every ten minutes. The girl glanced at him, but without recognition or even an attempt at recognition. She went to the counter and ordered a latte with a scone. To go. Oh. Couldn’t be then. He checked his watch again. The two hands again formed a straight line, but this was half the size of the agreed meeting time and the larger of the two covered over the small one. A half hour already gone. He checked his watch again. 31 minutes.
    Maybe, he thought, maybe, no probably, he should go before she even showed up. He would be better off, he was sure, but he didn’t want to be better off he wanted to smile. He knew he had a problem. He knew that he was addicted to beauty and the feeling that beauty gave when it was possessed in the mind, squelched down in the psyche, digested in the ego, and then laid as fertilizer in the id from which (he knew this consciously) it would spring up, bloom at the exact wrong time and manifest itself as horrible wandering lust and masturbation and he would start to mentally and then physically act out without first realizing where exactly it came from, but all the time he’d have a strange image of a beautiful woman leaning over, pouring coffee, her cleavage nicely displayed and he’d realize that he had seen her two weeks ago in a Starbucks and how funny that he would think of her now.
    He was eager and sweating. He gripped the table with his right hand and his left hand felt the wall next to him, running his fingers over the texture of the paint. Thinking maybe soon he would be able to run his fingers over another texture. To run his fingers over skin as it broke out with small goosebumps, to feel it transform from smooth to bumpy from the mere influence of his touch and all the significance that that touch carried.
    The door to the coffee shop opened up again and he recognized her immediately. There was the look in her eyes that he had been eagerly seeking all the while, looking for it in every possible female that happened to enter. She glanced over in his direction and he smiled and raised his eyebrows. His heart beat faster than his feet tapped the uneven base of the table and both he and the table shook a bit. She began to walk over to him. She was pretty, beautiful maybe, in the right light. But not now. Now she looked tired and it was early in the day, wasn’t it? Nobody’s well rested these days. Because it’s easier really to be busy and tired than well rested and bored. And the bored people were the people they always found swinging at the end of ropes hanging from the rafters.
    So, she was pretty and she was smiling at him now as she walked over to him. She had a slight limp, like she had just sprained her ankle and was compensating for it. He tried not to notice and thought about the way his face was composed, because he wanted to keep it off his face that he had already noticed one imperfection, with more to come, but now he needed to practice pretending that he didn’t see them because later, hopefully, he would be able to tell her that he noticed no imperfections in her and she was perfect and everything and more than she had written about herself.
    She sat down without saying anything and he figured that he would have to speak first and the moment should happen soon before things got strange.
    He told her that she looked beautiful and was she an artist because she looked as though she should be and even though he didn’t know anything about her now he hoped to know much more about her very soon. She didn’t speak for a while but only smiled and nodded, the smile reaching her eyes, but not enough to displace the guilt that was already there.
    She finally spoke and told him that this was so out of character for her, but she had a friend who had confided in her and told her that she had been doing this for the last year and it was the only way to blow off some steam and to do something mindless and guiltless and feel good and the well never ran dry and why didn’t she try it just once and see how she liked it. She said that she had postured for a while, but that she couldn’t get rid of the thought of it and she had looked at the other postings and thought many times about writing to the men that posted there, but she never did. And she decided on the spur of the moment that she would write. The first person she had written to seemed nice but only sent her picture after picture of what he called his man machine and asked her if she was into something called water sports. She backed off for a long time but last week decided to try again so she wrote to five different guys and he was the only one who kept writing back with sentences and punctuation marks other than exclamation points and he seemed normal and sane and hesitant too and he would be a good one to try it out on, so she had set up this meeting. And she was so late because she had postured again telling herself that she had to clean her apartment from top to bottom because it really was a pigsty and she didn’t want him thinking low of her. And she sat on her bed for an hour before she came not doing anything in particular but trying to control a nervous twitch that had recently appeared in her stomach and when she thought she had finally got it under control she got in her car and drove the five miles here and…
    She was silent then, her words trailing off cutely in a shy denouement that usually befits the kind of girl who would never do this type of thing. She stared down at the table, tracing the grains of the wood with her finger.
    She looked back up only when he placed his hand over hers and stilled her and she was comforted because this was the act not of an aggressor, but of a lover, of one who appreciates and wants to show her that he appreciates. And she smiled and he told her about how he skinned his knee when he was ten because it was the first thing that jumped into his mind and it seemed just about a million miles away from this and she asked him after he finished his story if he would mind driving her back to her place and he could come in if he wanted and he said he would and asked if she would mind if he sat on the bed for a bit because talking can tire a person out and then the talking was quieted as they pressed their lips together and laid on the bed and he closed his eyes and held her close to him to feel something close and to be happy about holding something living and warm and something that loved to be held and told that love was close and would not leave anytime soon and soon enough they both fell asleep under the covers and it was warm but comfortably so and in the morning when he woke up and saw her bathed in the filtered sunlight coming from the window, showing the frayed ends of her hair and the dust floating aimlessly in the air looking only for a place to land, he thought suddenly that this was the right light and she looked beautiful and he decided that he should tell her his name when she woke up and he laid back in the bed, draped his arm over her and felt her body move closer to his, without thinking, like an animal snuggling next to its mother for warmth.

"The Posting" by J. T. Lofton.