There it sits, irrevocably hunched on a bench, the gremlin. Of indeterminate gender, hands racked with tremors, it sits and takes up as little space as possible, a dot, a period on the blank page of roiling foot-traffic.
It’s been branded, the gremlin has, in attire embossed with emblems of the university on whose campus we dwell, sporting a head full of that curly hair that, when kept short, requires little maintenance to look perfectly coifed. It is literate too, forcing that shaky hand across a pocket-sized notebook, my notebook, actually, if I can judge correctly from this vantage point.
We are diagonally situated, it reading what it has written more than writing, me writing more than reading what I’ve written. When it stands, as it does occasionally, it pulls at the back waistband of its little-kid pants idiosyncratically, splaying back its jacket into black gargoyle wings, and takes a break from writing (or reading that previously written) to smooth down the front of the recycling bins with something resembling terrycloth.
The gremlin and I share the same notebook, despite the distance between us. We share our notebooks as we doubtlessly share an intuition: We are both of a type here, writing, however sporadically, into our respective notebooks, sitting, however fitfully, on our respective benches, grimacing, however casually, at our respective lots... I can only presume our exchanged glances to be evidence of that unspoken commonality and find myself in want of a windbreaker to flare.
That with head bowed it stands the height of the recycling bin, while amusing in its exploration of things small in stature, seems immaterial until their similar shape and matching dispositions creates a tableau not unlike that of a family portrait; that the gremlin replaces an old decal on the bin-front with a delicacy that calls more to mind the dressing of a child than the application of a sticker would seem to confirm the analogy, even down to the muttered recriminations in the afterward.
There it goes, hands dug deep into its pockets, dot-dot-dotting along the page of those punctuations audacious enough to take up space, gliding deceptively in its decrepit hunchback gait, leaving only me and an ellipses trail behind.
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