A mid-thirties man in designer jeans that probably cost more than her whole outfit stared back at her with his mouth comically wide as coffee dripped from his rumpled hair and streaked down his shirt.
“How… how did you…?” he babbled, coffee drizzling off his nose and lips.
“Excuse you,” Gillian said, never even considering that she should be the one apologizing.
She stepped around the hapless hipster, careful to avoid the wide puddle of coffee from the now empty cup clutched in his hand. Walking briskly to the counter, Gillian faced Joe Jr and told him her name and coffee order. He stared blankly back at her.
“Gillian. Medium latte with a single shot of espresso. Skim milk. Iced,” she repeated to the barista behind the register. He didn’t respond. Hell, he didn’t even blink.
Gillian glanced to her left where a white paper coffee cup sat on the counter with the name “Jay Leno” written on it in black sharpie. She snorted lightly. That was obviously for her. She stepped over to the pick-up counter and grabbed the cup, turning toward the exit. A green neon sign glared garishly over the door with the words NO EXIT practically shouting at her as the neon in the tubes stuttered and glowed angrily.
The coffee-soaked man stood hopelessly in the little lake as Gillian sipped her coffee. It wasn’t iced. Of course. Jr never got her order right. But at least it was room temperature so it didn’t burn her lips off as she closed the distance between the counter and the exit that was not an exit.
“Are you going to pick that up?” she nodded at the coffee cup that had dropped from the hipster’s hand to rest on the floor beside his liquid coated Converse.
He glanced down at the coffee cup with “Contestant #2” printed on it in black sharpie. As Gillian lifted her own cup to her lips again, she had another vibrant vision that seemed just as impossibly real as the one from an hour ago. In it, she was the one muttering in the middle of a pool of spilled coffee, clothes drenched and makeup marking black lines down her face like tribal tattoos. In the vision, a perfectly dry man stood beside her, chuckling awkwardly. Reality struck Gillian like a ton of bricks and she choked on a gulp of her latte, spluttering, and coughing as she fought to keep from drowning on a swallow of tepid coffee.
Hacking and wheezing, she drew in a stilted breath. The hipster was still frozen in place, shedding drips of rapidly cooling liquid onto the linoleum floor of the coffee shop at his feet like a melting ice cube.
“I’m Arlo,” he said softly.
Gillian couldn’t even be sure that he was talking to her. He said it almost like it was a forced response followed immediately by a frightening little giggle that sent a chill up her spine.
“What is reality, anyway?” she asked absently.
Brushing past the somehow strangely familiar fellow while brushing away the cloying memory that was not a memory, she left the haus, lukewarm coffee in hand.
Gillian hunched her shoulders to make her body as narrow as possible as she passed between bunches of business people on their way to work menial dead-end jobs. Between the clean cut, suit clad citizens and the cacti that filled the squares of soil in the sidewalk planters, Gillian had difficulty avoiding being touched. The constant arm brush or hip bump would spur her on faster to her unfulfilling employment at the billing office in Downtown.
Gillian sidled through the sliding doors of the office building exactly twelve minutes early. Walking past the employee washroom, she paused for a moment, head cocked curiously, as she felt the desire to use the facilities. Not a bodily urge. She didn’t need to pee. It was more like a feeling of some vague task she needed to perform to begin the work day. She couldn’t have said what that task might be, only that it required her to enter the employee restroom. But not to use the toilet.
It suddenly occurred to Gillian how unsettling it would be to pass on in a public bathroom. A lot of famous people have left this life while on the toilet, from celebrities to kings. One regal example being Catherine the Great. Famed Empress of Russia, Catherine had a less than great cup of coffee one morning that must have been on par with Java Joe’s as it left her sprawled out in horror over her chamber pot. Her epitaph should have read ‘Famed wit… died while taking a shit.’
Gillian dropped her own barely sipped coffee into the trash can with a shiver, walking quickly away from the unassuming beige door to the potentially life-threatening lavatory.
With ten minutes to spare, Gillian sat at the light wood colored laminate desk in her cubicle. The monochromatic atmosphere was equal parts soothing and depressing. Gillian always felt more productive when she could focus on the task at hand rather than if a room’s drapes clashed with the carpeting.
Once, in what seemed so long ago that it felt like a past life, Gillian had a full on panic attack at an “upscale” hotel where some neurotic interior decorator who must have been blind or criminally insane had filled the 1200 square foot space with six-inch wide, striped green and white wallpaper AND a hideous yellow/brown dotted carpet. The horror. Even after all this time, the memory would still elicit shivers.
Gillian dropped her port colored purse onto the short Berber carpet beside her chair. Booting up her computer, she waited impatiently for the ancient machine to cycle on. Good thing she was early because her desktop seemed to be taking forever to start up. Idly, she fidgeted with the items on her immaculately clean station. She unclipped the phone cord so that she could smooth out the loops that invariably appeared. Lining up the taupe
