The Weight of a Soul (1)

    The Weight of a Soul  (1)    © Hein Mönnig 2013

And so the writer sat, back to the wall in his favourite corner, scanning the coffee shop's clientele for random inspiration.
    Yes, all the regulars had shuffled in as soon as the waiter with snake-like hips had swooshed open the sliding doors at 9 am — the vacuous hipsters with their gleaming Apple Macbook Air notebooks, desperate for a skinny latté with free order of public Wifi; the belligerent, boot-wearing builders who, routinely, would appropriate at least two or three tables for the public spreading of blueprints, and the rather loud spreading of blue epithets regarding their contractual bosses; the over-Botoxed matrons with frozen foreheads and dead eyes, gleaming under highlighted tresses whilst they scanned the pump-wearing competition with self-righteous disdain.
    So much sarcastic material, such little time.
    He had filled tomes, novels and epigraphs with much maliciously merry analyses of such creatures he beheld surrounding him now. In fact, he was a human parasite, feeding voraciously on the pathetic poltroons that offended his sensibilities.
    But none he scorned as much as himself.
    What price, a man's soul if it be fed from the bones and remnants of another's?
    As he spooned another 5 grams of brown sugar (the "healthier" alternative...) into his long Americano, he considered the mutual obsessions with mass – how the ostentatious rich would glory in the ordering of a 500g steak, as opposed to the humble Joseph Soaps with their 75g steak rolls, the prancing models who wiffled and squeaked in feigned horror as  another sliver of buttered croissant slid down their silky gullets, the builders who were of the manly and joint opinion that no single beer of 350ml would cope without the buttressing company of another ten.
    So much weight, such little substance.
    So much calamari, crayfish and sole — such little soul...
    He chortled mirthlessly, silently, at his tiny pun.
    And as the writer sat in his corner, collecting silly and superficial images for his next socialite's novel, his soul leeched from his cranium – not because it wanted to fly as free as a bewinged beast, but because there was no weight to tether it, no mass in venal veneer, no gravitational pull of a solidifying sphere.
    As a writer, he appreciated paradoxes.
    And his skeletally-thin soul wafted off, he felt its ghost weigh down on him – an Ersatz replacement for happiness, success and meaning.
    The weight of a best-selling novel? About 400 grams.
    The weight of a soul when it has gone?
    Like a black hole, it weighed all and nothing, simultaneously.