Café

An offering of flash fiction in which a deep anguish is born of a longing for a familiar face…

by: T.E. Cowell

Apart from our age difference and sex, we had some similarities. We sat in the same café, for instance, drinking coffee from the same size cups. We’d look up every now and then from our respective reading material to notice people, cars passing on the street, the changing morning light coming in through the windows. What we read was different, but the fact that we were both always reading was a similarity. The books she read were of different lengths. One looked about as big as a dictionary. I was impressed by her stamina, by an apparent thirst for knowledge. One time when she closed a substantial book and got up for a refill, I casually walked over to her table and glanced at the spine. It was Ulysses. She was reading Ulysses in a café — something about this struck me as wonderful. I took her very seriously after that, and because of her age assumed she was in college. I assumed she wanted to be a writer, too, due to all the books she read, and assuming she wanted to be a writer I both admired and felt a little sorry for her. I wished her luck with all future endeavors, and though I hardly doubted her, I thought she’d be better off studying something more practical. Engineering, for instance. Something she could make a comfortable living doing. If she were my daughter, I thought…

We never said a word, not to each other. We never needed to, it seemed. I arrived at the café about twenty minutes earlier than she did each morning, and when she arrived we’d glance at each other, smile, and sometimes nod politely, and that would seem like enough. I like to think that we felt and appreciated each other’s presence more acutely because of our silence. Our silence seemed to speak an agreeable, subtle language. 

Then one morning she didn’t show up at the café, and in consequence I found it a challenge just getting through the morning paper. I missed her presence terribly. A week went by and I didn’t see her once. I got it in my head that she’d moved somewhere else. If she were indeed taking college courses, I wondered if maybe she’d graduated, or if she’d transferred to a different college. I wondered if maybe one of her parents was sick, or if she’d been offered a job in another town. I wondered lots of things, and finally I stopped wondering. She was gone, and for whatever the reasons nothing would change the fact.

I continued to miss her silent presence. Then I started frequenting another café, because I didn’t like looking at her empty table and being reminded that she was no longer sitting there reading a book. The new café isn’t the same, of course, not without her there. I read the paper just as before, just as I’ve always done since retiring. I read the paper and drink my coffee and look up every now and then at people and cars passing on the street and the changing morning light that comes in through the windows. I do all this like I’d done in the previous café, yet something fundamental seems to be missing now from the quality of my mornings, and I know that it is her. 

T. E. Cowell lives in Washington State. He’s been writing for well over a decade, and has had short stories published in a variety of different literary journals.