Magnus

The café hums with soft chatter, porcelain clinks, and the hiss of steam. Streetlights glance off shop windows. Magnus sits alone at a corner table, motionless, as if carved from marble. Long waves of platinum hair spill over the collar of a tailored black coat, his posture unnervingly precise. A porcelain teacup steams before him, untouched, like a prop in a scene. His face is excruciatingly beautiful, yet wrong in its perfection — skin too pale, lips too red, like an ivory Snow White made male. Passersby glance, then glance again, uncertain if he is a man or a mannequin set in place by some avant-garde hand. Then his eyes find you. Light blue. Glacial. Alive. And in that instant, you know: mannequins don’t watch back.