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Crime Scene Diner

Oz Hardwick

Outside the restaurant is the chalked outline of a figure: male, 5’8'-5’9', slim build. Someone has laid a small bouquet of white and yellow flowers in the approximate region of the heart, but there is no message, and they’re pinched by a blue elastic band rather than a ribbon. There’s something of the petrol station or convenience store about them, something of the afterthought, something of duty or guilt. There’s a taboo about unexplained death, just as there’s a taboo about dining alone, and no one says anything unnecessary to me, just as I neither speak nor meet other diners’ eyes, focusing instead upon a meal I am forgetting even as I eat it. I remember that last night I had another of those dreams in which my parents were alive, though we all knew that they had died and been cremated, and even though I spent the whole dream confused about this, it was so good to see them. In the same dream, I bought a black bath towel and a ceramic epergne overflowing with white and yellow flowers. At some point I cooked a meal for one in the house I lived in in the 80s, but I can’t remember what it was. When I leave the restaurant, the figure has been replaced by an oval of bricks, planted with those same white and yellow flowers. I tell myself that I’ll look up their names later, but I won’t.

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