I sat still and stayed quiet while she focused on my face. The entire time she was drawing, I had a strong, somatic, dare I say synesthetic response to her attention. What I mean is I felt as if she were touching me with her pencil. Her hand made broad, sweeping strokes and small, intricate marks on the paper, each one like a gentle caress on my face. And as she tilted her head and squinted at my features, I had the sense she was examining my interior as much as my exterior.

“You have a beautiful mouth,” she told me matter-of-factly. “And your eyes are almost symmetrical.”

She used her hand for a bit, shading and smudging until her fingers were gray from the graphite.

“This is fun,” she mumbled, as if she were talking to herself. “There’s so much going on behind your eyes, and that makes for a very nuanced portrait. On the surface you’re all still water. But man, that water runs deep.”

“Swampy,” I mumbled.

“No talking.” She shook her head. “Besides, you’re wrong. I can see people’s spirits when I draw them, and yours isn’t swampy. It’s a little marine flare blinking at the bottom of a deep, dark ocean.”

She put her pencil down, examined her work, made a couple of additional adjustments, and then flipped the pad around for me to see.

“Well?”

She’d drawn me with a cup of coffee in my hands, looking a little off to the right, the cafe’s one big window behind me and to the left.

I studied the portrait for a while before I said anything. It looked exactly like me, and yet it looked like a stranger. She’d drawn a fiery light in my eyes that I didn’t think was really there.

“That’s how I see you,” she said.

Then I understood. She’d drawn the potential Joe Harper, not the actual one. Because that’s what a spirit is, right? Our best, brightest, purest self?

“I like it,” I told her. What I meant was I liked who I was in her eyes.

My coffee had gone cold, I went to get a refill, and when I returned to the table a young man who said his name was Finster had taken the seat beside October. Finster had no food or beverages in front of him and claimed he had been a lobster in a previous life.

“I had a beautiful lobster wife and a lobster daughter,” he explained.

Finster had broad shoulders like a swimmer, a square forehead, a square jaw, and wild, crystal-meth eyes.

“We lived peacefully in the ocean for years,” he said. “Then one day my family got scooped up in a net and ended up in a tank in a seafood restaurant near the wharf.”

I tried not to laugh. October listened politely, her chin in her palm, elbow on the table.