《Silvana: Queen of the Witches》Chapter 12 (B) - Back to the Grind

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Compared to the hustle and bustle of the morning, the afternoon on Monday was pretty slow paced. A handful of customers filed in and out: a father and son sharing hot coffee and a cookie, a writer and her agent discussing the draft of an article over iced tea, and that same grad student who showed up for a few hours every other day.

By seven it was dark out and starting to get around time to close. The grad student was the only one still left. He continued to pore over his research materials and his notes, seemingly without ever picking his head up from the page.

I started sweeping up the floor of the almost empty cafe. I did always like to leave people as much time as I could to finish whatever they were doing- I never wanted to be that asshole, you know. Anyways as I was cleaning up I caught a glimpse of the book he was reading.

It was a page of squiggly stellar sigils- Aldebaran, Algol, and Betelgeuse, and beneath them long and thick descriptions of their attributions.

"Uh, excuse me." I said.

His head darted up, he'd been so absorbed by his reading that he hadn't even noticed I was there. He was dishevelled but handsome. I'd never really taken the time to look at him. He had thin blonde hair and green eyes under his round spectacles. He wore a chocolate brown leather jacket and a flannel shirt that I could only imagine being terribly sweaty in this late summer heat.

"Is that The Three Books?" I asked.

"What!?" he said.

"Agrippa? Is that Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy?"

"Ooooh" he exclaimed. "Yeah! H-how'd you know that?" he asked with some trepidatious suspicion.

"Well, when I was in undergrad I wrote a little survey article on the transmission of hermetic philosophy to the renaissance. I ended up talking a lot about Agrippa and the sources he was drawing all his lists of magical properties from."

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"Oh... Um... Wow. Wasn't expecting anybody for a hundred miles to actually know what I was reading. Yeah I'm doing some comparative stuff on Agrippa right now?"

"You're a grad student, right?" I asked with a smile.

"Uh, yeah, I'm interning at the Renaissance Center at Umass." He briefly withdrew his glasses and pinched the sides of his weary eye-sockets. "My dissertation is on the ideological and political context of neoplatonism in the late renaissance. I end up going back to Agrippa a lot."

He looked me in the eyes. "Sorry. Anyways, is there something you wanted?"

"Oh, no, sorry, I just needed to say that we're closing up soon."

The student looked at the watch on his wrist. "Shit! I didn't notice the time at all!" he exclaimed, bolting to his feet and frantically stuffing his books and laptop into his bag.

"Well, hey, I was a Classics major! I'm into all this stuff! We should nerd out sometime!"

"Oh. Cool. Uhhh, maybe someday when I'm not so busy. Like, maybe by the end of the decade!" he chuckled to himself.

"No, but seriously!"

"I'll say 'hi' the next time I'm in, but I can't make any promises." He said halfway to the door, before turning around and offering out his hand. "Sorry, my name's Eli."

"Silvana." I said, shaking his hand.

"Well Silvana, thanks for all the coffee. Good luck learning all the secrets of the cosmos."

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