Page 2 of Soft Flannel Hank

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Esther MacLaren had beenin World’s End for two weeks. The motel where she was staying left much to be desired in a variety of areas, chief of which was the complete and total lack of any meaningful water pressure, which meant that her thick, curly hair never got fully wet and as such could never get fully clean.

The mini fridge had enough room for a half gallon of milk, some yogurt, a six pack of beer, and a bag of grapes for which she’d paid entirely too much and had yet to remember to eat.

It had rained every day since her arrival. Were it not fifty degrees outside, Esther might have been tempted to try to use all that driving rain to do what the shower could not and clarify her scalp. But itwasfifty degrees, and so Esther found herself curled up in a booth in the back of the diner, cradling a chipped cup of coffee in her hands, her messy hair piled on top of her head in a bun and her sweatshirt hood pulled up over it.

It was a steady night at the diner. After two weeks of dinners there, Esther could tell. Her booth was tucked away on the opposite side of the restaurant from the restrooms. Unnoticed, she watched.

Four men from the mill sat at a table, their coveralls dusty and dark, two with toothpicks gripped between their teeth. Two women laughed as one cut up chicken tenders for a small child and the other doled out little pieces of french fry to a baby in a highchair. An elderly couple sat side by side in a booth, eating in silence, their shoulders touching. He ate with his right hand, she with her left, and the press of their bodies in the middle was comfortable. Familiar. It made Esther smile to see them, their movements synchronized in the way of people who have spent decades together, their auras perfectly matched in color and brightness. She wondered if they were holding hands under the table.

Behind the couple, a man sat alone. He clutched his coffee cup with both hands, leaning onto the table, his head hanging. He wore a green flannel jacket over a gray waffle-knit shirt. His dark hair clearly hadn’t been cut in a while and hung shaggy over his forehead and ears, brushing the collar of his shirt.An untrimmed beard brushed his broad chest. The flannel jacket strained over his shoulders. He lifted his head to look out the window at the dark parking lot, and she saw the circles under his eyes, so deep that they almost looked like bruises.

The day before, Esther had been in Charles Mill to buy new watercolor paints and paper. The sun was out—or what passed for the sun being out on the Olympic Peninsula—and so she decided to walk from the craft store to the coffee shop down the block. She had been walking past a gallery sandwiched in between a bistro and a lawyer’s office when her intuition crackled. Curious, she opened the door and saw along the back wall a collection of large black-and-white photographs of shipwrecks. She had stood for a long time in front of the display, studying the wooden hulls, half destroyed by an angry sea, but still somehow holding most of their shape even if they’d lost their trappings. Their decking. Their paint. Their crew.

Now as she watched the man scratch a fingernail against the side of the cup, his shoulders hunched and heavy, Esther remembered the shipwrecks. Like the photos, he was beautiful in a jagged, frayed sort of way. And she could have stood in front of him for a long time studying the heavy pulse of his Adam’s apple as he swallowed, the thick fingers wrapped around his mug. She felt her tarot deck, always in her backpack, calling to her. She wanted to read him, to learn what it was that had left him so very weary.

Which was ridiculous, of course, but as she sat in the shadowy corner of the warm diner, the fluorescent lights casting everything before her in a cheery brightness, the smell of fry grease and burgers and pie and industrial cleaner mingling together, she wanted it all the same.

He looked away from the window, dropping his chin to stare into his coffee again. Not drinking. Just staring. As if the answers to every single problem he had could be found at the bottom of the mug.There was a brokenness, a despair that hung thick around him, clouding his aura.

She put her own cup down and leaned over the table to see him better. She wanted to map the lines that wreathed his eyes, count the gray threads that peppered across the dark sea of his hair. Surely there was divination to be had there, too.

She felt her Doc Martens against the tile floor, felt her body’s energy course unbidden through her feet, felt it snaking between table legs and chairs, around legs and bags and wrappers of sugar packets, dropped and forgotten, until it disappeared under the table where he sat.

His head shot up and his eye locked on hers, the distance between them telescoping down to nothing, the noise of the diner softening to a dull hum. He pinched his eyebrows together, his forehead furrowed, his mouth open, and for the first time, she could see that his eyes were almost as dark as his hair, a deep brown the color of the coffee in his cup.

Esther felt her breath catch in her chest, felt a tingling sensation in her hands and feet. She clenched her hands into fists, stuffing them into the front pocket of her hoodie. But she didn’t look away and neither did he.

The bell over the door chimed, and a tall man in a black sweatshirt walked in, pulling down the hood to reveal shiny black hair tied in a long ponytail. And just like that, the connection was broken. Those dark eyes flipped away from hers to this new man, and something that could only be described as an imitation of a smile appeared on his face. They shook hands, and the newcomer clapped a hand familiarly on the other’s shoulder before sitting across from him. Their low voices rumbled across the space, loud enough to be heard but not loud enough to be understood.

But then his eyes were back. He was listening to his friend—because they were friends, that much was obvious—but his eyes flicked back to hers frequently, his brow furrowing each time. He lifted his mug to his lips and took a long sip.

Before she had a second to consciously make the decision, she reached into her backpack and found her tarot cards. Her fingertips ached as she gripped them in her hands, the worn deck held together by a green, satin scrunchie. She shuffled them, feeling the roughened sides of the cards against the creases at her knuckles.

She didn’t feel called to draw, but the urge to have the cards in her hands was undeniable. And so she shuffled. And shuffled. And shuffled. The cards grew warm and pliable, and the diner slowly emptied out until the only people remaining in the warm, yellow light of the diner front were the shipwrecked man with the beard, his friend, Esther, and the server who was spraying cleaner on tables and wiping them down with a white towel.

Esther had stopped staring at the man some time before, but as if her body had maintained the connection, she could feel his every move. It was almost like a string tied around a rib beneath her heart was anchored around one of his own.

His friend stood. Esther heard him attempt a laugh and clap his friend on the back three times in a hug. The bell above the door chimed as the man in the black sweatshirt pulled his hood up over his head and walked out into the night.

In her periphery, she saw the bearded stranger walk toward the door. Esther’s breath caught in her throat but she kept shuffling, feeling the weight of his presence from across the room. He raised his hand to the push bar on the door, then stopped.

Her hands felt heavy, as if gravity was pulling on them with more force than the rest of her body. And all of a sudden, the atmosphere in the room changed. Like going up in an airplane or elevator too quickly, when the ears pop or your body rebels against the sensation of that abrupt interruption of equilibrium.

Esther lost all of her equilibrium as the man suddenly stood in front of her, hands fisted at his sides, his body a respectful distance from her table but close enough that she could smell the Irish Spring soap and rain and sweat and coffee that clung to him like a shadow. She met his eyes.

He cleared his throat. Shifted his bulk from one foot to the next. He was nervous. His energy felt tightly coiled. Not like a snake, coiled to pounce, but coiled as if to make himself as small as possible.

“I, uh—” He cleared his throat again. “I’m sorry to bother you, but—”

“You’re not bothering me,” Esther said lightly.

He stood there, squeezing his hands slightly tighter before relaxing his fists momentarily. He wanted to say something. But he didn’t. He just stood there, looking halfway between horrified and determined, as if he wanted to talk to her but couldn’t wrap his brain aroundwhyhe would want to do such a thing.

Esther took pity on him. “Do you want to sit?”

He rubbed a hand down the length of his face before returning it to his side in another tight fist. “Diner closes in twenty minutes.”