There’s a soft clatter of porcelain. There’s a warm flow of conversation. The light is white, filtered through tall, open windows. We’re in an elegant but still relaxed coffee shop. In Manhattan, of course. At a corner table, a woman is sitting with her cappuccino and cloth napkin. Near her rests a framed portrait centered next to her table. It’s of a beautiful woman striking a vanity pose, who looks quite uncannily like her own face. She studies it. She’s basking in the amusement. “Well, hello.” Her eyes smile wide. She writes Breakfasting with my portrait. Now I am taken up with all of my day in the flattery of a second. And it looks perfect when I turn my eyes. She looks at the portrait as if she wants to touch it. She continues. So: To the character of yourself. You may seek refuge before your departure, keeping a little piece of yourself. She looks again at the portrait as if it was her new companion. I smile for this friendship. Of how good a company it is to rest in, to excite in, and to keep. She puts her glossy pen down. She leans back and her smile is still wide, as if tickled and guilty of her own vanity.
Renée Frackiewicz Gravesen is a writer and maker whose work layers spiritual reckoning, fantasy, and a love of love. Shaped by BBC dramatizations, old folk songs, and her Guatemalan, German, Polish, and Midwestern-Chicagoan heritage, she crafts poems and hybrid texts exploring interiority, myth, glamour, goblins, and grief. Her lyrical play In Remembrance is currently in development alongside a body of poems.
Modern Flash Fiction 