Joe Jr was helping an older couple in matching Hawaiian shirts who were asking what every single item on the menu was. Arlo giggled anxiously. This might take a while. Luckily, the woman with the dancing hula girls swaying across her chest told him to go ahead. She and her husband, Gordon, would need a minute.
Arlo ordered his usual beverage and sat at one of the tiny tables to wait for his coffee. Some litterbug had left a napkin on the floor. Stooping at the waist, he picked it up only to find that the scratchy brown paper had a happy face drawn on it in black ink with the words ‘Welcome to the Hotel California’ written in careful calligraphy. Arlo crumpled the little note into a wad and tossed it into a nearby trash can.
The unmistakable sound of the barista plopping a 20 oz cup of coffee on the counter signaled that his order was up. Arlo grabbed the taller of the two cups waiting for pick-up and glanced at the name that Jr had scribbled on the side of his drink with black sharpie.
‘Contestant #2’
What a joker. Arlo lifted the cup in a salute to the comedian coffee slinger and started for the (NO) EXIT. As he pushed lightly against the tinted black door, someone or something on the outside pushed back.
Arlo was never a stellar student. Far more interested in extracurricular activities, he’d barely skated his way through the courses required to graduate, skipping anything not absolutely, unequivocally necessary for a diploma. Too bad, because if he’d taken Physics 101 instead of making videos about who wore the worst Furry costumes at Comic Con, he might have recognized that he was facing a perfect example of the scientific definition of force.
As Arlo pressed against the door, he was met with an opposing resistance. For one tiny moment, the two forces sang in perfect harmony, creating a hum that illuminated their existence for such a tiny fraction of time that neither Arlo nor the opposer noticed it. Within the blink of an eye, the force from outside overexerted Arlo and the door slammed into him and his large caramel macchiato hard enough that he ran right into his own coffee. The cup crumpled under the sudden coercion, and an anti-gravitational waterfall of coffee catapulted so high in the air that it nearly hit the ceiling before spilling down in a murky torrent on poor Arlo. Thankfully, Joe Jr had forgotten the whipped cream because that might have been a bit sticky.
Arlo stared in shock at Opposing Force as she shoved her way into his reality. As sweet, lukewarm coffee dribbled down his designer togs, a woman whom Arlo somehow felt he knew faced him with a frown.
She should be the one covered in coffee, Arlo thought inexplicably.
That’s not to say that Arlo was feeling some bitter notion that the rude door pusher should be getting her just desserts, i.e.: sweet caramel macchiato on her hair and skirt suit. No. Instead he was feeling with every fiber of his being that this has happened before.
How many times before?
And that every time before, she was the one covered in coffee.
“How… how did you…?” he babbled, coffee drizzling off his nose and lips.
“Excuse you,” she snarled in reply.
Arlo stood frozen in place, macchiato sluicing off his shoes to gather in a wide puddle at his feet. He was concentrating so hard on every tiny detail of this moment and what made it so familiar and yet so distinctly wrong that he didn’t notice the coffee cup slip from his hand to splash at his feet, rolling to a stop beside the toe of his left shoe.
The woman in the slim-cut dress suit and three-inch heels clacked across the floor to stand before him. She was beautiful in an austere way like a statue or one of those sculptures made of ice on cruise ships. Cold and sharp and impossible to touch.
Glancing down at his feet she asked him, “Are you going to pick that up?”
Arlo looked from the empty cup on the floor to her raised eyebrows perfectly on pointe with not one tiny dark brown hair out of place.
“I’m Arlo,” he said stupidly.
He was not prepared for her response, “What is reality, anyway?”
She forced her way past him and out of the shop before he could formulate a reply. As the swinging glass door closed behind her, the coffee haus came back to life. Echoes of clinking flatware, footsteps, whispers. The Hawaiian print pair breezed by with matching cups of green iced tea. Java Joe Jr’s voice calling, “Order up!”
Arlo picked up the empty coffee cup he’d dropped and carried it over to the waste can, sneakers squishing in a most disturbing way. Careful to pull the door in on the off chance that another ice sculpture brought to life might be waiting just outside to body slam him, he stepped out into the scorching heat. He was starting a new job today and he didn’t want to be late.
As he cruised along the cracked sidewalks, Arlo mused about the appearance of the oddly familiar woman at Java Joe’s. Who was she? He would have been the first to admit that he had a terrible memory. As a child, Arlo’s mother, Mrs. Constance Black of 665 Whippoorwill Lane, Calamityville, MS, constantly hounded him to do his chores. Make his bed. Feed the dog. Turn in his homework.
In Arlo’s defense, it wasn’t that he was lazy… necessarily, or disobedient… per se, it was that he couldn’t seem to remember anything past about five minutes. Unless it was something that he was really interested in, of course, like planning a road trip to see the Pink Flamingo Extravaganza: an art installation in an abandoned auditorium filled with over three-thousand plastic lawn
