I finished reading a story that I myself had finished writing six months earlier. Even while at work with my scissors and gluepot, I’d forgot why I put in certain things. Humor, considered eighty times, had long since ceased to crack me up. But, at this remove, in others’ typeface, I could offer at least a good father’s fond half-smile as one joke did its single back flip, ably, if a bit too much on cue.

I looked up and around at Ossorio’s tiles, wintogreen and custard; I glanced toward huddled coffee drinkers arguing at those tables set between me and streetlight. I seemed to be recalling one of my own sweet seriously fucked-up students: “Poor struggling brat. But I do hope the kid will keep trying. A story about a goddamn dog! But, in time, the boy might really hit on something. He’ll bump against some event in life that’s big enough to lift him. For now, he’s overly happy to just be doing it! A four-year-old boy let loose in the Philharmonic’s percussion section. Oh well, someday maybe he’ll learn …” and I put my head down on the cool pages of my first visible story. And actually fell asleep.

Most of the night before, I’d been up pacing, stage fright. I feared I would feel a total fool when it was “out.” My parents would simply airmail me a one-way ticket home, no note. Our so-so family honor besmirched, fools’ names and fools’ faces. It’s painful, to be always so visibly trying … you know?

I slept on it, my work. When I waked myself—no one having nudged me—I guessed by the light it must be nearly four already. I felt some movement at our table and looked up and all my friends—pretending not to notice me—sat circled, reading their own copies of the self-same magazine.

Held up over their faces. “You guys,” I laughed, sitting straight. But they maintained this pose of feigned detachment, reading, scanning me, reading me alive.

Friends’ faces were hidden by my issue. (Who says I had no offspring?) Instead, I studied each set of hands. I saw Marco’s tapered fingers, one knuckle smudged with the exact print of one bike-chain link, fingers strengthened by hours with the pear-wood recorder he had never let us hear him play. Gideon’s were dark-skinned with the most beautiful pink nails and, I noted, this close, a colorless polish; I marveled that someone like me, scraping for the rent, should find ways and means to sustain a continental manicure. Robert’s hands were an athlete’s or a farmer-carpenter’s, fractured by subtle veins that each terrace-farmed a different plane; each hand made you want to do a portrait—manly hands like those on slender boys by Botticelli. Angie’s were a potato-eater’s, and the more she tried to hide them via fingerless gloves and long sleeves, the more their energy tubered forth. Today hers were marred by a yellow ochre oil paint, half coating a cheap if big-rocked “dinner ring” I’d given her.