One-Coffee Lunch

“I enjoy being alone, but I don’t like feeling lonely,” is what she would have said if she had anyone to talk to. The cafe was bustling and the steep incline of the street hosted a veritable throng of lunch hour pilgrims: huffing and puffing their way up, or gracelessly galumphing their way down the sidewalks. Everyone was sweating into their business casual or formal respectively.

She sat outside, the little round table tipping away from her in accordance with the angle of the ground. The table, though unstable and poorly made, was nevertheless incredibly heavy lending a real dread to the threat of it’s toppling. She didn’t normally sit outside, but the cafe was crowded and she convinced herself that it would be nice to change things up. The weather was lovely today after all.

The day’s meteorological disposition was indeed pleasant, but the breeze was blowing down the cross streets and now she had the sun on her. She always started sweating when in direct sunlight. She hated the sun for that. Most commutes saw her scurrying in heels from shadow to shadow like a some sort of low-rung corporate daywalker. All this in addition to the hefty, wobbling, slanted table and the difference in the length of her chair legs conspired to make her sweaty, squinting, and in no way as relaxed as she thought she’d be.

She’d spilled some coffee on her hand due to the angle of the table and the stupidly shaped porcelain mug (why had she said “for here?”). Having forgotten to grab napkins she wiped it on the back of her shirt (which was a forgiving hue) in a spot well covered by her blazer; however, now her hand smelled like coffee and there was an additional quandry of whether or not to remove the blazer. If removed, she’d be much more comfortable, but she’d already kept it on too long and a brief sniff test told her there’d be a noticeable BO by now. Not to mention the coffee stain. All things considered, she decided to keep the blazer on and sweat it out. But that could make the blazer stink. She decided to remove it.

With the blazer finally off and draped over the back of her chair she felt much better. A consistent breeze now ushered itself gently down the hill and, in combination with her well developed perspiration, proved wonderfully relieving. Her senses calmed. She blinked slowly, and breathed through her nose. Her coffee, which, because of it’s temperature, vessel and angle, had become an enemy, now found itself in her good graces once again. She lifted it to her mouth and breathed before taking a sip. It was good. Good chocolaty, toasty, earthy coffee. Not the fruity, acidic lizard piss that most coffee houses shat out these days.

She set it back down and folded her hands in her lap, allowing herself to slump a little in the uneven chair pushing herself gently back and forth with one foot like one would in a rocking chair. And she felt it. The dull hollow ache. How she’d love someone to talk to. She felt as if the only thing solid about her were her was skin, thin and brittle like enamel, enclosing a breathy emptiness.

It was her habit to people watch at such times as these. The shapes and shades they took were pleasing in their variety and one could always imagine their stories or find humor in their idiosyncrasies. But today the people passing only hurt her to look at. Those women across the street, for example, she would like to be friends with those women. They laughed warm, healthy, genuine laughs as they walked away and down the street. She smiled too wishing she could be in on the joke. That man coming up the walk on the phone looked kind and his clothes spoke to eclectic and interesting taste. But he laughed and spoke with an individual named “Babe” and that soured it. She never liked “Babe” as a hypercorism anyway. It was an ugly, crass, boring little word.

Someone used to call her “Babe,” once upon a time. The troglodyte. She did miss him though. Or she missed something about him. The space he filled maybe. The warmth and solidity of a dedicated companion, however miserable the company. For the briefest of moments she considered the appropriateness of texting him. Of seeing what he was up to. But no. She’d deleted his number anyway. And she was terrible at remembering anything that wasn’t written down. She knew that well about herself which is why she’d taken precautions.

She looked down at her watch: a plain little round watch with a black, faux-aligator band and a white face (no numbers only dashes with the 12 dash being slightly bolder than the rest). Her lunch hour was nearly up. Rather: by the time she made it back it would be nearly up. The thought of what her mother would say about her one-coffee lunch passed like an anxious ghost through her distracted mind as she downed the remainder of the lukewarm beverage like one would slam a shot. She grimaced, wiping away a droplet of coffee from the corner of her mouth and collecting her things.

Standing and smoothing her skirt, she retrieved a crumpled pack of cigarettes from her clasp. Fully biodegradable filters! The thought of what her mother would say about chasing coffee with nicotine was detained and expelled before it could fully enter her mind. Cradling the fragile flame of a Zippo with the palm of her hand, she began the fifteen minute trek back to the office leaving a transient wake of curling smoke that rose into the sunlight.

Dick couldn’t speak. He wasn’t dumbstruck, flabbergasted, or tongue tied: he couldn’t speak. He could tell he was making the woman behind the counter nervous. She wasn’t looking at his eyes but at his scar. Most people looked at his scar. How long it had been since someone really met his gaze was something he’d long forgotten. If he’d been able to count the days they would have totaled 1,104. Three years since the accident.

He lifted his eyebrows, trying to soften his expression, but if anything it made him look wild and strange. He raised his arm like a theme park automaton pointing to the keys hanging on the wall behind her. She flinched at his movement as if to dodge a blow before looking behind her at the keys. She chuckled nervously and turned back to him.

“Oh,” she sighed. “A room?” He nodded. Her eyes returned from where they’d fled. Just below his jaw. Her attempted smile faded at the renewed sight of the ropey scar tissue that ran thick and jagged across his throat like some sort of keloid serpent. “Can’t uh… Can’t talk?” She gulped gesturing absently to her own throat.

He wasn’t sure if he should nod or shake is head. In attempting to decide he did neither and simply loomed. He was very tall. She swallowed hard again before turning and taking a set off keys of its hook.

“How many nights?” He raised a solitary, calloused finger as if adjuring silence. “One night?” He nodded and blinked slowly. “That’ll be seventy five dollars.”

He extricated a fat, brown leather billfold from the pocket of his jeans and leafed through the notes. He produced the requisite amount and handed it to her folded between his middle and index finger. The register drawer opened with a ponderous rattling and she deposited each denomination in its respective slot. The drawer shut with a clatter and the receipt printer grunted and chirped as it extruded the glossy white tab in labored, spastic jerks. She stood with the pad of her hand resting on the machine and her fingers poised about the emerging receipt. She glanced back to his neck as she waited for it to print. She tore the paper on the little steel teeth and handed him the slip.

“How’d it happen if you don’t mind me askin’?”

They stood in silence for a moment. It might have been amusement that wafted ephemerally over his otherwise stoic features. He raised his hand to his neck, fingers curled into a fist save for the overlong thumb which jutted out normal to his palm. Drawing the thumb slowly from ear to ear he traced the crooked path carved in his flesh, sticking his tongue out one side of his mouth in a garish pantomime of death. It was unclear to the woman if this was intended to be humorous. Whatever the intent, she found herself feeling slightly ill and did not laugh. She did attempt a smile, but her mouth only fluttered strangely.

“I’m sorry. I should just mind my own business.” She brushed a loose strand of chemically reddened hair out of her face. “I just need you to sign in and we’ll be all done. You’re in 13. Checkout is at eleven a.m. tomorrow.” She drug the hefty three-ring guest book from another part of the counter and pushed it to him. The pages were yellow and stiff with age. His eyes briefly scanned the names which terminated half way down the page before he added his own in a pleasing, legible longhand. Richard N. Waller. He set down the pen and pushed the book back toward the woman. He nodded to her and walked out of the office, the bell above the door ringing after him as he went.

Notes:

The above is a short scene I wrote a few weeks ago. I thought up the character of Dick after reading Cormac McCarthy’s “The Crossing” in which a dog becomes mute after having it’s vocal chords severed. Yikes. Thanks for that, Cormie. I love how you always write about cheery happy things like attempted dog-murder that aren’t upsetting at all. (I call him Cormie. We’re close like that). Anyway, I thought “DANG! That’s BRUTAL!” and then thought “imagine if, like, the dog was, like, (get this) NOT a dog but, like… like, just a normal guy. Like a normal guy but with his throat cut off… like the dog in the… in the book with the sad young cowboy.”

“Wow you’re so smart and hot!” said the little voices in my brain. “You’re smexy! That’s such a good idea, wow you’re so hot and cool!”

Then I said: “If you think that’s cool and smexy just watch this!” and then I wrote that scene you just read. The scene up there^^.

So that’s where this scene came from. I’ve been enjoying writing these brief character profiles and I plan on exploring this particular character in greater depth in the near future.

I also enjoyed writing this because I think it’s funny that the character’s name is Dick. It’s fun having a character named Dick because you can just type “Dick” as if you’re not literally typing “dick” over and over again. It’s literally a name. Dick, that is. Dick is a name people have and other people say, “Hey, DICK!” or (if they’re proud of Dick) “That’s my Dick.” When a Dick walks into a room, some might even say: “Hey look at that Dick!” Admittedly, that would be a weird way to say that (as opposed to “Here comes Dick!”) but hypothetically someone could say it that way.

I like giving characters names that distract from the character themselves because that’s how real names work. Ever meet a guy named Ahab? It doesn’t matter if he’s a short, hairless insurance adjuster. In your mind he’s a vengeful whaler with a peg leg and beard. Now you have to reconcile the preconception with the reality. Cognitive dissonance ensues. Everything becomes more interesting.

Till next time,

-Aaron

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Few in life have suffered in the way Chapman Peter Bahl suffered. To start, his first name sounded like a last name. Life is always harder if your first name sounds like a last name. His parents had subliminally consumed an add for a Chapman University online satellite entity while watching YouTube and immediately, if subconsciously, liked the name for a boy. Chapman’s parents also fell, like so many parents of their demographic, into a belief that unique names (or unique spellings of names) would make their children feel more special or, at least from an outside perspective, sound more special. So that was strike one.

In addition to his cumbersome first name there was also his unfortunate last. Much to Chapman’s chagrin, there is little to no phonetic difference between the pronunciation of his German surname “Bahl” and the more common English word “ball.” This of course was low hanging fruit for the other children when Chapman began attending public school.

“Lets have the Balls over,” said no one ever because they’d have to say “Let’s have the Balls over.” “The Balls are here.” “Did you see the Balls yesterday?”

Chapman’s parents didn’t seem to spend much energy considering the indignity of their last name. And good for them. But Chapman’s peers would not (and possibly could not) leave this phonetic similarity to escape young Chapman.

By the second year of middle school he was known as “Chapped Balls” by most of the children and by the third year he had come to respond to it. For some of the younger children that was the only name for Chapman Peter Bahl they knew.

Chapman was very pale. Pale with light orange-brown freckles and shockingly blond hair. Blond hair, blond eyebrows, blond arm hair, blond blond blond. White blond. Like bleached sunlight. His eyes, in consort, were a glacial blue: almost mythical in beauty if not for their context in his shy, plain face.

It has been established that, for a great deal of America’s history and even today, being Caucasian is an advantage. However for young Chapman, his embodiment of the Aryan ideal proved only another tool in the cruel, soft hands of his pubescent tormentors. A particularly venomous and wretched group of high school boys started calling him “Hitler’s Ball” which, though a clumsy moniker, made up for it with it’s sheer toxicity.

On account of the cruel, multifarious twistings of his first and last name, Chapman was petrified that any might discover his middle name “Peter” especially after overhearing another boy refer to his penis by the same name.

The final nail in the young man’s social coffin was his status as an only child. Such an existence is, by default, a lonely one as you spend your childhood third wheeling a married couple. You also grow up quickly, but not in a cool way. Instead, you mature in that awkward lopsided fashion best visually represented by a child wearing a suit tailored for an adult male.

If only-children do not quickly establish themselves as the top of the bullying food-chain, they are inevitably viewed as prey by their peers and unsettling freaks by adults.

“Let’s not have the Chapman’s kid over,” the fathers would say when presented with a guest list for little Timmy’s birthday party, “He gives me the creeps.”

“I think you mean the Ball’s” the mother would respond, correcting the accidental first-last name swap. “But yes I think your right. He and Timmy aren’t really friends anyway.”

So Chapman Peter Bahl suffered, and suffered alone.

Notes:

Thank you for reading! I… I love you! … Sorry.

Anyway, I have been having a lot of fun writing these short scenes and am looking forward to sharing more. So long for now. As always, feel free to give your feedback.

She’s running out of time.

She feels the mass of that dread rolling black and thick just beneath the floorboards of her mind. “Not all is as it seems,” she’s heard people say. And that’s true. All appears calm, normative, in order, when in reality there are an untold number of vectors converging on any one person at any one time. Like a bullet fired ahead of a running target, prophesying the moment and place of death not yet realized.

More extreme examples of such morbid nexuses can be found in the corners of local newspapers and click-bait blogs. “Family of Five Killed as Passenger Train Derails into Ground Floor Apartment” type things. “They had no idea” some say, “how little time they had left.” The truth is no one has any idea when one’s proverbial train will arrive.

Most people are able to forget this underlying uncertainty. We comfort ourselves with average life-expectancy for persons in our demographic. “I’ll probably live till 70. Heck! With the way modern medicine is advancing, maybe even 80! You know my great grandfather lived to be 91.”

We do make allowances for those who die occupationally of course. Heavy machine operators slain by their very own heavy machines come as no surprise. That’s always a risk, given how heavy the machines are, and the operators know that. Same goes for a free climber who plummets to his death scaling Half Dome. She wonders what sound it made. What sound he made when he hit the ground. The sources don’t say. Did he blow apart or did he simply stop? She doesn’t know, but those who found him said he looked asleep save for the blooming crimson halo about his head. “He knew it might happen someday,” is how we assuage the dread.

She, in contrast, cannot forget the fragility of even the most standard life. It is especially difficult since she has witnessed death. Knowledge that the unseen whirring of the world’s machinery could at any time mandate her departure from the land of the living instills a sense of hurry. Or worry. We often reassure her: “You’re still so young. You don’t need to worry about running out of time just yet.” But we might say “She was so young. Taken before her time.”

Sometimes the knowledge of her frailty and tenuous casting upon the stage of life can become an obsession. (It is well known that many of the best actors have been cut from production with no explanation and in ways that might have better befit a drunken belligerent who won’t read the lines but that does not preclude the presence of logic in Casting’s choices). Attempts will be made by her to divine what that logic is by which such things are decided. In what manner will she meet her end: Blunt force trauma? Virus? Accident or murder? First or second degree? Terrorist attack? That’s just a different kind of murder. No… More likely disease. Or an accident. Yes.

Perhaps such theorizing is an attempt to lessen the shock or surprise of the thing when it happens. Or perhaps it is an attempt to, in her own small way, outwit God or Fate or whatever’s in charge. It is important for her to feel a sense of control, to gurgle a nonchalant “knew it!” before it all fades to black. Maybe then she could take the fun out of it for the cosmic executioner. Maybe it would chafe and itch in that obscure and swirling alien mind like a grain of sand under an eyelid. “How did she know? The bitch! Maybe I’ll resurrect her just to see how she knew. No. No. Can’t do that. I’m getting sloppy.”

Soon after becoming obsessed with the idea of her own death, she quickly becomes convinced of it’s imminence. She will die. It will be unnatural. It will be quite horrible. Hopefully tragic. She is terrified of dying on the toilet. Whatever the cause of her demise, she sometimes wishes it would just happen already and we could get this over with. You know, hit the reset button if there’s any reset to be had.

One may rightly wonder why she does not take her own life at this point.

Kill herself? What, are you insane? She doesn’t want to die, she just can’t stand the suspense. You couldn’t understand.

Suicide is breaking the rules.

People who are obsessed with their own death rarely look forward to it. It is a miserable thing, you must understand. She’s convinced that you really must be miserable and chronically afraid if you are to consider yourself part of this club. People who really want to die do. It’s not hard.

There are stories of the occasional hypochondriac or agoraphobe living well into their nineties and such tales fill her with a sense of cosmic humor and a bizarrely warm and fuzzy feeling. Hearing such accounts are to her a cool drink in a parched desert of faceless terror. However such a respite is not a rescue, and she renews her morbid calculus with all the greater fervor for the morsel of hope. Perhaps, she might subconsciously believe, if she convinces herself so entirely of the inevitability of her early and excruciating death, the Universe (which seems to have an ironic sense of humor) will be left no choice but to grant her long life. But time is up.

Her proverbial train arrives suddenly in the form of a commuter bus.

Note:

This has been my first ever fiction posted to Substack. Congratulations!! You survived! If you did enjoy this piece or found it relatable please be so kind as to tell me. If you did NOT enjoy this piece: keep it to yourself. My ego is very fragile. I’M JOKING OF COURSE. haha…

No but seriously, I am looking for feedback. Both constructive criticism and pure hype. I obviously enjoy the hype more, but I will accept the criticism with the grace of a martyr and artist, consoling myself with the knowledge that genius is hardly ever recognized in its time.

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