The Respite

I read a great deal of fiction, but write very little. This is something like a short story, though as is the case for me, there is nothing much like plot or characterization. It is, more likely, masturbatory word play and scene setting. But here it is, regardless.

He walked with his thoughts like angst ridden dogs, tugging him about by the leashes meant to lead them. They pulled this way and that, questioning and doubting and flinging anxiety and misery in to the maelstrom of consciousness, until there was nothing to do but give them their way. It was easier, if not altogether easy, to take this path. It was best to give in, for to fight them was always to lose, only with more damage done to an already battered psyche.

The sky was clear and sun shone bright in it but the air was cold, cold such that the appearance of the sun was just that, and appearance, a damnable mirage suggesting heat, but providing none. There was wind coming from everywhere, cast about by the buildings and the hills and there was no place to hide from it. It had no discernible beginning or end and so it cut from all angles.

There were other people about, hands in pockets tightly clenched, heads shrunk in to coat collars. They walked as if the cold and the wind were things to be raced, to be escaped, but it was not so. They were cold and the wind battered them about and they walked, pressed against all of it and away from it but always were nothing but inside of it, enveloped by it.

He saw them and was among them and though that they must be like him, walking away from things and to things that were not the cold or the wind but were things larger and more powerful still, things esoteric and existential and impossibly infinitely intangible. He walked and felt his legs move, his feet grab and push, holding on to these tangible and real things, grounded quite poetically by the ground, he thought.

The building was brick and there was paint on it that had been chipped away so that you could read none of it clearly. The paint had been a name once but now it was just called The Brick or just Brick because people will do the easy thing when the easy thing is indeed easy and is just as good as more trying options, so far as they can tell. The steps in front were three, the second of which was broken and had to be stepped on just so, otherwise it would collapse.

He stepped on the far right quadrant of the second step and quickly ascended to the third and then to the top, littered with cigarette butts snuffed out on wooden planks, too damp to catch fire and too old besides. The door was a metal of some kind that had rusted some years ago, covered with a screen that had torn slightly at the bottom where someone's dog had run through it. He opened it and there was a slight flapping sound that caused the others already inside to look up briefly from their tables, but only just for that second.

Inside there were flannel and tattoo sleeves, bangs greased by virtue of poor hygiene rather than sartorial concerns. The floor creaked as he approached the counter, wooden with a thousand marks, each covering a thousand more like debaucherous cave art, a cultural tapestry clawed by nails and pens.  There was a great metal thing on it, several feet wide and a couple feet tall, with two wands protruding from each side. It hissed and spat steam and scalding water from several places, except two ports, placed on the underside of a facade on the front of the machine. From those, there came a deep bronze liquid, laced with gold and burnt orange. It dripped like amber and oil. Espresso, it was called.

"Double," he said.

There was a groan and a pop, followed by more and more, the cracking noises condensed in to a matter of seconds. Then there was a whir, the noise traveling in to the machine's bowels, wherein it spun and became louder. Silence, then, followed by a burst of air from the second port, and finally the espresso. He grabbed the cup in to which the espresso had been dispensed, looked at the bronze pool and imagined that the shapes there were really shapes, really intentional things with real significance.

He swirled the cup and raised it to his lips, drinking with a slurp, drawing in air and espresso in equal measures. He tasted chocolate and honey, sweet and bitter in perfect balance. Or at least he had read that this espresso tasted like these things, and believed it to be the case, since he had never had either. The opening and awakening he felt behind his eyes was not second hand experience, however. Neither was the warmth that started in his mouth, and spread to his extremities. These things were real and he felt them, embraced the sensations themselves and the fact that they were his to embrace.

He held them tight as he drank again, walking out the door and again in to the bleak.

The Young Man and the Rush

*With sarcasm. Lots.

The sun crested the horizon, amber rays washing down the hills. They swept across the street, and poured through the glass of a building, illuminating the dim visage of an espresso machine. Like honey, it stuck and dripped and covered, until the room was lit.

And then there was movement. A crack of a door, and shuffle of feet and a large red bag, dropped to the floor.

A man followed, dressed for doing. Black jeans, black shoes, and a black shirt, only discolored by accumulated espresso, hung from his bones; wispy stubble and just-out-of-bed hair grew like stalks from his skull, waved like a field of grain.

He went to work. The cafe was soon alive with clicks, whirs, hisses and pops. There was coffee then, food placed at the ready and espresso tinkered with, until it too was ready.

The light dripped, the clock ticked, and he pulled back the gate.

The customers approached warily at first, testing and teasing with glaces and questions. Some grew bolder, approaching with orders at the ready. Still more took the coffee for their own, with nary a word and hardly a gesture. The man stood before them all casting aside their initial advances. Too easy.

The next wave was more, in every sense. It loomed, ominous and quiet, before breaking and casting tumult in its wake. There was chaos, movement everywhere and a sea of noise, nothing discernible from anything else, all a swirling, teeming froth. And the man stood against it, unmoved, like a buoy made to withstand a storm of just this magnitude. The wave broke on him, but he did not break.

But while the first behemoth loomed, it served to block the army of giants following. Standing against one had required resolve, had been a challenge. To stand against them all would require that, and some degree of luck as well. Mostly, it would require the knowledge that there was nothing left but to angle directly for it.

And so he did, keeping his mind set to the task before him - to this breath, to that shot, to that button and that "haveaniceday".

And still they came. More, when more seemed impossible. The reservoir seemed infinite, and in the epiphany, he took solace. If there was no victory, then there was no defeat. If there was no hope, then there was no fear. There was only the next grind, tamp, twist, and pull. There was only that crema, that rosetta, and then the next.

Until there wasn't. Until there was calm, and then a breath, taken without threat of drowning.

He drifted then, his destination inevitable, until the final drop of amber dissolved in to the black.

Sugar

He looks up from his mug, following the cascade of sugar up the hand pouring it. There is a girl there - the waitress - and she is smiling, chomping on a piece of gum.

He does not understand this, but says nothing, mostly because it's 3 A.M.

"I thought you needed it sweet, sugar," she says.

He is not sure if this is happening, or if he's imagining it. This is a scene from a movie - from a thousand movies - and the waitress a cardboard cutout straight from casting.

The sugar stops.

"Well?" she says. "Ain't you gon' drink it?"

He does not think that he will, and he does not want to. But he is polite, and she has prepared the coffee for him. The diner is empty, so is the road. No one else is around to drink it, and so he decides that he should.

He lifts the mug, slurps, and takes a moment. It tastes like sweet, hot water. It is how he imagines Oscar Wilde might have taken his coffee, indulgently sweet, maybe offensively so.

He sips again, slurps, then drinks. His neurons fire, and he is grateful for the caffeine, if not for the method of delivery.

His brain is functioning now, and so he begins to gather his thoughts. He is running, and has headed this way because it seemed a bad place to run, and thus a worse place to follow. He stopped here for coffee, because he needs to keep running, and maybe for bacon, too.

He decides that when the waitress come back he will order bacon - four slices, crispy - with buttered toast.

He does not see the waitress however, and wonders if she is out back, smoking. She is not waiting on other customers, because there are no other customers.

Minutes pass, and he finishes his coffee. There is a film on his tongue, and so he gulps down his water. The film remains, however.

More time passes, and he wants to leave now. His stomach is trembling, gurgling, and the bacon no longer sounds good. He tries to stand and look for the waitress, but the cramping sensation in his abdomen will not allow it.

He tries to steady his breathing, and notices that his vision is blurry. He wipes his eyes, but feels nothing. He notices that he does not feel the table when he touches it, does not feel the booth or the floor either.

Then he notices that he does not feel anything, and notices nothing more.