An ordinary Tuesday.

It was ten minutes to two on an ordinary Tuesday and I was walking through the city by taking the lanes and alleyways. It was a cool afternoon but not cold. Even so, scarves and coats were everywhere. Maybe people are thinking, It’s May. Wear a scarf and a coat.

It has always been possible to walk entirely through the CBD on foot via lanes and alleys. It’s fun to do this and avoid the major streets. But now there are even more lanes and alleyways than before, and they all seem to be full of cafes and fast food stalls.

I was walking through a new development heading towards Elizabeth and Lonsdale and in the alley that was more of a breezeway, there was one of those cafes that only sells chocolate. I thought, what is it about chocolate? How can you make money selling only chocolate? What if a customer wanted a steak or a chicken sandwich?

They were making money. The place was packed to the rafters and there were extra seats in the alley. You could smell the chocolate. It hung on the air, even though it was a breezeway. Maybe it was the smell of money. Kind of dark and metallic with a warm, happy afterglow.

The thing I noticed was the plate in front of one of the diners. Sometimes melted chocolate is so seductively silky, it actually has a mirrored surface. The chocolate on the plate I saw had a mirrored surface. You could have looked at yourself in it. It was all over the plate like a volcano spill, with a dramatic lip at the edge characteristic of a substance that is thicker than fluid, but not yet solid. It was oozing down from a mountain of the deepest, darkest brown sitting in the middle of the plate like the Rock of Gibraltar. The mountain looked like cake but I think it was fudge; because, just as I passed, a gleaming stainless steel spoon slid into it without any apparent yield from the texture around it. Cake would have yielded. There was more chocolate on top, shards of the stuff, curled into sensuous come-hither shavings. The spoon lifted and a hunk of the dark stuff came away, bringing with it a sludge of the semi-molten glistening brown fluid as well as a few of the curly shavings. I think that was all but there might have been more. There might have been thick cream and pure vanilla ice-cream and berry couli and angels and harps but I didn't notice; I caught the scene in just a glance. But I did notice that everywhere there, people were eating similar kinds of things in various warm dark brown hues and textures and fluids and powders.

The funny thing was, they weren’t eating like people do in a normal café. They were eating slowly, and they were staring as if transfixed. As if they were having some kind of out-of-body experience.