The Cough Droplets
Is That A Viking?
The cough landed like zest on the open pages of her book before she realised what it was. A forceful expulsion of air from the lungs at nearly 50mph, driven by the muscles deep inside his substantial chest and abdomen. None of this was visible to her naked eyes but his shoulders were wide and his arms strong - a Viking her best friend would say. There was a bit too much overall hemp for her, but he looked interesting – a builder, or maybe he was in land management or a tree surgeon? Probably none of these.
Instinctively she wiped the drops away with her right hand. Right page, right hand. She was lefthanded. The moisture that had spritzed out of his lips didn’t make contact with her fingertips but rather the cushiony fat pads over the lower two joints. The four fingers moved as a group like they were a mitten or a flipper. They didn’t sense the wetness, or anything at all really, they efficiently and perfectly performed the job, like a giant kitchen spatula.
But there he was on her skin and as droplets inside her book. Page 21, The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong. Looking across the lines she read:
“He dressed and laced his boots, then reached into his jacket’s inner pocket. Under the crushed pack of Marlboros, gum wrappers, a few coins, he found his contact lens case…”
Yes, it was him.
The book which had just arrived in the post was a present to herself after hoovering up ‘On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous’. She would take it everywhere with her for the next few days.
When she looked at her palm he had disappeared, through her semi-permeable skin and had dispersed out into the air. Yet there he sat at the table next to her, nothing in front of him yet to drink, eyes locked onto the phone screen. He must know the people who owned the café she surmised.
As she lowered her gaze, she imagined his DNA floating about in the clear droplets from his dead lung cells which had just been coughed up. Like iridescence on water, marbled microscopic pieces of dust, pet dander and excess mucus, had been sent by the Greek goddess Iris as rainbow puddled messages from the Gods, out from deep inside of his body and into the world. The saliva was clear at a glance and mesmerized her. There’s always so much you can’t see even when you know it’s there, even when you look. Right now she believed this almost more than anything. As forensic scientists know, when saliva is dried on paper, the liquid portion evaporates but the biological materials including the DNA and white blood cells remain adhered to the paper’s fibres.
As his was a fresh sample he would remain detectable inside her book for quite some time. Maybe some of the book printer’s DNA was inside her book too as well as some of her own – a trio of moisture and DNA drying out together at different speeds. Wow, this must be happening all over the world right now – her mind was boggled.
Turning over her left hand, her eyes scanned across the heart line, or distal palmar crease. Almost horizontal it ran out about two-thirds of the way across her palm, finishing with an upward flourish at the end, starting from an indent just underneath her smallest finger. This is not the health line, so imminent death shouldn’t strike she thought to herself and well, palmistry was not really her thing. Having figured out that she was at least two thirds of the way through her life, her luck in love had just run out. But she didn’t believe this either. Curious, she flipped over her right hand, to find the same line patterns here, as if they were identical twins. Lines ran everywhere across her hands which seemed to have been very liney from the get-go and more liney than most people she knew her age. Secretly she liked her dry old looking hands, it was as if her hands kept the score - they looked like her mum’s hands and showed how full her life had been so far.
The man next to her was joined by someone else, a woman. She closed her book as her friend with the beautiful forearms and an expansive ruddy décolletage turned up.
“It was one of those friendships that came on quick, like the heat on a July day” same page higher up. And she proceeded to laugh her way into the awakening Saturday morning with him.