CoffeeBeanShop

Delivery

by Kimberly Charlton (bio at end of story)

The first one was bad. I thought that stirring in sweetness and a dollop of cream would help, but it was bitter as sin. I kept drinking because I’d paid and was committed, but damn if it didn't knock me to the floor. The memory of it still makes me sick.

Now this one, sweet and full, bold and rich, is imploring. I stir and examine. I get down into it and inhale. I taste it and it hurts with heat. Still, I know it’s mellow enough. I want it, but think it might kill me. Do I want to be somebody’s wife again?

I'm a poor barista. I don't mean financially – well, that too – but I mean I am, I guess, not a good barista. I'm glad to have the work; nobody wanted me since the big downsize. "I don't know beans," I tell the customers to make them giggle. Until reading our table talkers, I'd never heard of Kaldi, the Ethiopian goatherd joining his hyped-up, dancing livestock in eating the strange cherries they’d found. I'd thought the beans were legumes, popped from pods and ready to grind. Now I've learned a little. I improvise. The world map, antiqued with wet grounds, backs me up. Stickpins jut from the favorites of the week: Green pins mark the robustas, gold the aribicas. They think I know. I fill the stainless steel commuter mugs and let them think it.

My coworkers tried to teach me despite the challenge. Once I'd learned barista didn't mean the former president of Cuba, they started working on "essences" with me. I haven't learned them all by taste, but I applied them instantly to the people teaching me: Shane is acidy, Jimmy is briney, Esther is sharp, LaTrell is smooth (or so he thinks), Almita is sweet, and I thought I was "whiney" until Kayla was hired. Now I realize SHE'S whiney. I’m just bitter.

This job was supposed to be my self-imposed lesson in humility. I would land a job even better than the last, and wave goodbye to these benevolent but shabby toilers. Well, now I'm just plain poor and shabby too. Everything's lost but the worn little scraps of my intellectual smugness, which I’m clutching like a 6-year-old's last strip of satin from the precious old blankie. I stand tall before the clientele, even the ones wearing all black and psuedo-bohemian attitude. But I never put this place on my resume.

He's from Pasto which, yes, I thought would have been in Italy. They've got their own volcano, called Galeras, alive and rumbling and ready to cook the populace. But he lives near Bogota now, and coordinates distribution among the farmers, or cafeteros. I'm just a failed editor fumbling through the concept, he's all business; he guides the teeming ignorant masses to the hope of comprehension. That's how he came to know I exist.

When the manager, Jimmy, recovered from a backroom conniption over a shipment which STILL didn't include the Colombian, we started e-mailing distributors. Jimmy declared that we'd get what we needed if we had to go to the Federation. That made me – a deeply closeted trekker -- tremble with glee for the nanosecond it took to realize he had to mean Colombia.

I shouldn't have been showing off, but I couldn’t help it when my bean contact said he was going to an exhibit in Bogata and mentioned a Medina he wanted to see. I replied that Medina’s art is among my favorites and I even named a painting - Wodaabe Man - that I would buy in a moment if prints became available to peons. It was just to let him know he had nothing on me, except maybe money and position and gender and the benefit of a world that gave him the best pedigree because of all that. Next thing I knew, the shop was getting the best of everything when, or before, we wanted it. And I was getting messages at home and wrestling to keep up with an IQ as good as my own and a brain that was better because nobody had bopped it around. Then phone calls. Then letters. Then him. It was like my conversion from cola to chocolate latte with extra whipped cream; it was still gonna kill me, but not without some ambience.

When the others here talk about him they call him the cartel guy just to tease me. They've been preached to, but they persist. And worse, they fling adolescent double meanings and triple entendre when they tell customers that the Colombian is coming.

Steeped in logic, he used to measure out emotion in demitasse portions – or at least he did before he loved me. For me, he boils and steams, and blasts and scalds like Galeras.

Well, now I'm displaced. My house is in foreclosure and soon I'll have no pot to – well – you get it. Undone. Slipping from the mainstream. Tonight, deadline night for the big yes or no, which I was never wanting anyway, I told him to forget it. He should be relieved, I said, that he was still 2,710 frequent flyer miles away from me. I'll steep awhile but I won't wallow. I'll limp on, and get better. It's about to rain again. Gotta stop this and put some buckets around the kitchen.

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Spanish to English and back again. Here at El Dorado airport they blend them together, and I can forget to think in one language alone. Now on the plane, they've added sign language to the safety demonstrations. It feels like it's taking forever. I want to scream, "We comprehend! When the little masks fall, we put one on ourselves before helping children and the infirm. Reach under our seats for the floatation thing. Seats upright. Fasten belts. No smoking. We all understand -- Hurry!"

Nothing is moving fast enough, and I am eager to be away from here and in Illinois. Looking out the window, I'm afraid I’ll see my Tia Aldonza running onto the tarmac to plant herself in front of the plane. My uncle had his fit and finished with it. My aunt goes on.

"Chicago!" she hissed, and each time she hissed it, she spat over the garden wall to rid herself of the obscenity. "A crazy woman in Chicago! Who don’t even want you!"

My uncle smiled wanly, all screamed out and ready to be kind. "He’ll be back," he said to her.

I nodded earnestly. "I will," I said. "I will. I'm not going away forever. Most likely."

I shouldn't have added the last part, and she was a problem thereafter. I had to turn off my mobile phone on the way to the airport.

Now, in the air, I clasp a cup of Medillin so hot my eyes threaten to brim over, and I wonder how someone could know it was 2,710 frequent flyer miles unless this person had looked it up. And how she could look it up unless she cared. I gaze out the window again, and wonder how anyone could see thunderclouds in such a vast, clear sky.

© Kimberly Charlton. All Rights Reserved.

Finalist - Delivery by Kimberly Charlton

Kimberly Charlton writes and edits copy from her home in Kenosha, Wisconsin. While she writes feature articles for publications in the Great Lakes region, DELIVERY is the first fiction piece she's ever allowed out of the house. No stranger to transition, this former Kansan is packing for a move to England where, she's learned, coffee is as important as that other drink.

Editor's Note: Delivery was chosen for the first round for the following reasons: From the title, we presumed this would be a story about pregnancy and coffee. Not. This was an interesting plot where there are two voices, and each one done in a different genre. Although we're not sure this is acceptable elsewhere, we got a kick from it. The first part is similar to a journal or diary entry, and the last part is a character's train of thought. We're still musing about this; but, it was different, and we liked the similes throughout the story. The last paragraph gives a solid ending to the dreamlike quality of the story.

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