Forty-Fifth Paradox Writing

What do they keep in those back rooms downtown? Those rooms always seem bigger than necessary, and mostly empty. Perhaps the owners of the coffee shop live there, but they insist on hiding the furniture upstairs. Or maybe, at night, they drag in the comfy couches from the shop decor, and sleep on them (as well as the lamps.) That’s why they serve coffee you know. It takes nearly all night for them to move the furniture; they hardly get any sleep.

I found a bike in one, with empty stalls. The stalls may or may not have had curtains. What does a coffee shop need dressing rooms for? If you whisper the password with your order, will they give you a costume to try on? Is it frappuchino? No place seems to serve them, and Starbucks doesn’t have back rooms.

Susan Wheeler died on the 21st of June. The warm breeze gave her away to the first passerby, a seventeen year-old man (or a boy, if one talked to his mother) named Brad Pinkerton. He passed her body, not yet cooled (as if anything could cool on the sidewalks of Pasadena), and he was reported saying “She smelled like last weeks garbage.”

The autopsy report confirmed that the body was only a few hours old.  Both parents confirmed that the nineteen year old had gone missing earlier that day, just after lunch, when the sun cooked eggs on the concrete. Later they identified Wheeler’s dark tresses and the mole on her left cheek. Her parents couldn’t recognize much else.

Police investigated the case, calling the case a homicide. Five years later and no murderer had been found. Every third Friday a twenty-four year old woman visits the lawn, though the police have long since removed the yellow tape. She runs her hand along the blazing concrete and smirks, before she walks off, the sun catching the wave in her dark curls.

In Italy, in San Lorezno,

I found three options for Sunday devotion.

__________________

Some went to Sancto Laurentio

in their Sunday finest,

entering the wine colored doors

in orderly fashion

to quietly take their wafers and wine sips.

___________________

Others went to Bar Martins,

dressed to meet their finest friends.

They slipped under the roof

with laughter on their faces

and songs on their chests,

to drink anything and throw darts.

__________________

I sat on a bench near the fountain,

a scarf around my neck,

a Bible and notebook on my lap,

listening to living water and chewing words.

Everyone loves a good coffee shop. Finding a good one might be more of a problem. There’s Starbucks, who a loyal Dutch Bros fan wouldn’t be caught dead in. There’s Dutch Bros, who the typical Starbucks follower fails to know the existence of. Then, there’s the local coffee shops, the holes in the walls, the stand alones, and the caffinated pubs. Those are the best to go. The Bean is my usual haunt.

A different world sits inside, an alternate stage with unusual characters. Not a single hero shows up here. Every patron has a skeleton in their car, some with cat bones, others with an ex-friend’s remains. Others have their hopes and dreams grounded up into pale powder, others have burned their bone bridges into ash and keep them in jars. Sitting on a stool means more than sitting down. It means leaving your weight and saying to yourself “I belong.” Most likely the scenery will believe you.

The coffee? It’s magic. Each puff of steam is made of dying clouds and the sugar comes from stardust. When the barista hands the cup to the guy at the other end of the counter, its like she’s giving him a kiss. The kiss isn’t a casual Nice-To-See-You, it’s a fierce You-Belong-To-Me kiss. She lets go of the cup fast, so only a regular will recognize the spark. In fact, the barista does it to every customer, as long as they’re male. Girls get a knowing I-See-That-Once-Over-You-Gave-Him smile, but the barista refuses to compete with them. She saves her kisses for the hand-off. Guys are fair game after that.

The guy on the end? He comes in every other day, after his last writing class. His mustache twitches as he plops down on the stool, and a wry grin forms not on his lips, but in his eyes. After giving the barista a nod for his order, he flips open his journal, and writes. He etches careful letters across the page and he frowns deliberately every time. Most guys order a deep, black, coffee, but he only orders a white-hot chocolate. It sits idle, longing on the counter for his touch, but he ignores it for at least three pages. Then he takes a sip and the room sighs with relief, though it knows he’ll always come around eventually.

He never turns to look across the counter. The journal is his lover, his attention, his aim, his all.

The two of them stared directly overhead, with the backs of their heads tipped back. One had blonde hair that shined brilliantly as the wind tickled its ends. His friend had crew-cut hair as brown as the mud beneath their shoes.

“Whoa, what’s that in the sky?” The blonde asked the other, his mouth stretching as if he planned to drink the light in.

“I can’t see; it’s burning my eyes!” The brunette winced, ducking his head as he blinked repeatedly.

“But, man, does it feel good on my skin.” Stretching out his arms, closing the blonde his eyes with a sigh.

The brunette turned and looked at him. “Dude, are you high?”

“But look at all that blue stuff around it. It’s so cool!” He didn’t seem to notice.

“Hey…where’s the rain?” A third voice chimed in as she trotted over to meet them. Her eyes rose in the same direction from beneath red bangs. “What’s that yellow thing in the sky?”

Two friends lied on a grass hill, gazing up at the night sky. The stars gazed back, blinking occasionally. While the stars remained silent, except for the occasional breeze, the two friends allowed the wind to carry their conversation.

“What do you think that one is?” The first, a thirteen-year-old boy, asked the girl next to him.

“It kind of looks like you.” She replied, blowing a stray hair off her nose.

“What?”

“See?” She pointed. “It has your nose, with that weird bump and everything.”

“It does not.”

“Does too.”

“Yeah?” He shot back, pointing at a constellation next to it. “I think that one looks like your mom.”

“Does not!”

He laughed. Finally, he turned, glancing at her head’s profile, with the smooth nose, curved lips and a single eye. “You know what?” The boy whispered.

“What?” She continued to stare up at the sky.

“I’ve never seen the stars like this before.”

Finally, she looked at him, blinking curiously. “Really?”

The boy nodded, with each brush of his head shoving aside more blades of grass. “Back in the city, there’s all this smog and city lights that never get turned off. You can’t see anything at night.”

“Huh.” She glanced back up at the sky, as if the stars had the answers to her problems.

“And you know what else?”

“Yeah?” She sighed softly, glancing at him for just one instance.

He smiled just slightly. “The girls in city look at me like I’m crazy when I talk about leaving.”

Some people stay up to save the world. Firefighters keep the city from burning down. Doctors and nurses stay up all odd hours of the night to save lives. Counselors prevent suicides, and teachers fulfill roles they never receive pay for.

Some people stay up to get hard work done. Students make up for time procrastinated. Parents wake up at odd hours to defeat the evil side of the sandman, mop up floods of tears, and deal with messes they long forgot about. Businessmen stay up past heavy eyes and aching limbs to punch and crunch numbers on a calculator their minds struggle to wrap themselves around. Creative eyes pry themselves open to watch the brushstrokes reach toward a nearly non-blank canvas.

Others stay up to do things they wouldn’t dare get caught doing during the light of day. Thieves break into places they shouldn’t. Male and female eyes rove  city streets watching things they wouldn’t bear witness to in the morning. Otherwise good people sink to temptations they’d be embarrassed to talk about.

As for me? I stay up for absolutely no reason. I count ceiling blemishes because they exist. The sheep I count every night all have names, and different colored bows. I suppose I could say I have a sleeping problem, but it seems more like an addiction to staying awake.

Owners never light them well enough

Patrons tend to favor bigger cars,

With darker windows.

That could hide terrorists,

Kidnapers,

Monsters,

Dragons,

Even street rappers.

A health teacher told me once,

To carry my keys barred when I walk out the door,

As if that would stop a dragon.

But maybe it would stop a street rapper.

The tour bus rolled to a stop but didn’t open its doors quite yet. Shadows rustled behind shaded windows, eagerly anticipating the stop. Meanwhile the engines whined and hissed, before finally settling into silence. A hawk cried through the sky as it glided on drafts of air. On the streets below vendors displayed their wares for all potential customers to see. Finally the doors opened, and the rustling increased.

First out came the tour guide, a short woman with curly hair, sunned skin and a crooked nose. After her streamed a single file line of men and women glancing about with their eyes and their camera lenses. The line collapsed into a swarm of eager eyes and chittering mouths. They half-listened with their ears while they half-watched the world around them through the lenses of their cameras.

I on the other hand, ate my fallafal and pita bread as I tried to shut out the noise. With my feet planted on the sidewalk, my eyes took in the two streets, the alley way on across the street, and the door two booths away. Even when on vacation I couldn’t help but identify all the possible exits. Glancing at my makeshift meal, I tried to block out what had become instinct.

One bite of the crunchy treat and I wondered if someone had poisoned it.Sighing, I tossed my meal in the trash and pulled out my camera. I snapped a few pictures before I realized I had been searching for evidence. Evidence of what? A stray cat sitting by the bus? The man with the hair gelled so heavily I could snap needles off of it? The girl with a bomb strapped to her chest? ….

So much for a vacation.

Basically, when you encounter a suicide bomber, you have one of three options. You can run, you can scream, or you can try to stop the bomber, all of which will makes the girl to pull the trigger. You could shoot her hand off, but there’s no guarantee that one shot will take out both hands at the same time, and it only takes one hand to trigger the bomb.

If you have rifle loaded with disruptor shells, you can hit the trigger with a casing filled with water and avoid igniting the explosives. Though, if you’re on vacation overseas, airport security usually removes this option , and you’ll be lucky to even make it to your destination. Liquid nitrogen could be used to freeze the wires, and disable the triggering system, but good luck finding that in a street market. You could put pressure on her coratid artery, but you might have trouble getting close enough to her neck.

In some cases the bomber will choose to use a wireless trigger because they allow more subtlety before the blast. This counts in your favor because a wireless signal is a lot easier to disrupt than a wired one. You could call a bomb squad, but that takes too much time. Thankfully, when vacationing in a tourist trap, satellite dishes with strong broadcast signals aren’t too hard to come by. All a spy has to do is call the nearest TV news station, and wait for the reporters to take the bait.

Within a couple minutes they’ll come roaring through in her van, eager to broadcast the news first. They’ll park their van, bust out the cameras, and turn on their satelite router. The actual difficult part is getting the trigger from the bomber’s hand before the news crews leave. I prefer the subtle approach. Simply sneak up on her using the reporters as body shields, and grab the trigger.

Of course, if the mob of reporters knock you into her, things get a bit more complicated. You’ll have to move quickly to knock the trigger away from her hands as you tumble to the ground. And once the press vultures get close enough, they’ll likely send the trigger skittering into a mob of tourists, allowing you to disable the bomb.

And once you can get away from the reporters, and the wannabe bomber, you can enjoy a fresh serving of fallafal, and hope it isn’t poisioned.

I’ve never been superstitious. Sure, I always think twice before walking under a ladder, but it’s not because I believe in bad luck. It’s part of the reason why I’ve never understood the lack of a thirteenth floor in a building. Even when they change the floor numbers, there’s still a thirteenth floor, it’s just misnamed. I hate rising past the thirteenth floor for this very reason.

So one day I stood in an elevator of a building that reportedly lacked the unlucky floor. My eyes stared at the buttons in boredom, wishing I had laser vision so I could make the buttons melt. At least that would be entertaining. 9….10…..11…12….13….I blinked. That 13 button hadn’t been there a second earlier. The elevator continued to rise.

Frantically I pressed the 13 button, but of course the elevator had already passed it. Finally, the door opened to the floor I originally chose, but now I had changed my mind. I immediately pushed the door close button, to the dismay of the person wanting to enter the elevator car. I pushed the 13 button, and the car dropped. I had to hold onto the wall, and sit on the floor for fear of being thrown.

With a final lurch the car stopped, and the elevator chimed in snide victory. Shakily trying to stand up, I watched the doors open with a burst of light.