Compulsion - #fridayflash

Just get them dealt for goodness sakes she silently implored him. The man had been shuffling a deck of cards for an eternity. No one else was proximate to him, so seemingly there was no game it was directed towards. The lack of a flat surface in front of him legislated against laying them out in some version of solitaire. Or Patience she mused ruefully. It was a regular two-handed shuffle, where each card slips between the sheets of its loosely stacked bedfellows. None of that showy one handed stuff, where the deck is cut in half and passed over with just the pads of the fingers. But there again the man was too shabby to evoke the impression of being a stage magician. Even a resting one.

She turned her gaze to a woman sat glassy eyed and straight-backed on an easy chair. Staring into space as she contorted her lips to blow upwards, ushering a bang away from draping her eye. Repeatedly, for of course the tress reclaimed its station with each unassisted descent. She puffed it away again. This was idiotic. She wanted to shake the woman. What did she expect would happen? What could she hope to achieve? She felt like marching over to her and snipping the recalcitrant curl right off, but of course she had no scissors with which to do so. She averted her scrutiny in order to choke off her own irritation.

Her eyes alighted on a youngish man beating out a syncopation on his trousered thigh. As with the other two, he wasn't looking at his own motions, marooned in some inner thought. She tried to place his beat, for if she could recognise the tune she might draw a bead on to the man's psyche. But she drew a blank and fancied it might be of his own composition. If it was a code to his nature, she didn't posses the cipher to unlock it.

She continued scanning the room. A young boy was pivoting the seat of his fold up chair and sinking and rising with each tilt. Boys can never sit still, but this was behaviour beyond mere fidgeting. He was no less rhythmic than the drummer man, but each was plugged into their own private pulse. Completely unaware of each other, yet both were fraying her nerves.

For respite she turned to a dapper man exuding no sound at all. He was engaged in cleaning his spectacles with the tails of his shirt. The bridge of the glasses was delicately pinched between finger and thumb, yet the other hand was flaying the glass lens with the vigorous nature of his rubbing. She tried to catch his eye, but whether through myopic foreshortening, or that he was simply not focusing by choice, no acknowledgment of her existence was forthcoming.

She stood back to compose her thoughts. She was witness to an array of self-involved locomotions. An antechamber chock full of small convulsions. An assemblage of nervous tics. A cluster of compulsive disorders. Were they in a treatment centre, or its waiting room at least? If not, what were they all doing here? Just killing time. Whiling it away with displacement activity. Though displacement of what exactly?

Then it struck her, she too had found herself here hadn't she? What was her particular spasm? She looked down at herself to determine her tic. She could see no treasonous part of her obeying its own local bidding. No untoward movements. Without a mirror in the place, she raised her hand to her face to check its loyalty and began charting the topography with the tips of her fingers. Maybe that in itself was her tic? But no, she felt secure in the knowledge that this was the first gesture of its kind since she had first enrolled here. Whenever that had been.

And then it struck her. Her own, individual throb of self. Her defining trait. How 24-7 she liked to observe other people. To make mental notes. To cast judgement. Her curse was that of the writer. Only one stripped of paper and pen in this place of disarticulation.