Eyes Like Sky And Coal And Moonlight (15 page)

I particularly like the line about the frogs.

This story originally appeared in
Weird Tales
in 2008.

Dew Drop Coffee Lounge

The minute the woman walked in, Sasha sensed it. Her head went up, that characteristic Sasha motion, like a blind bear sniffing the breeze. The well-dressed suburbanite glanced over the surroundings as she entered the coffee shop. Her hair glimmered with red dye and was cut in a Veronica Lake bang that obscured one eye. I couldn’t see more from where I sat.

Sliding her notebook back into her bag, Sasha leaned forward, her gaze intent on the arrival, who looked back, first sidelong, then openly. As though pulled by that stare, she moved through a clutter of tables towards Sasha.

Her interrogatory murmur was inaudible except for its tone. Sasha nodded, gesturing to the seat across from her.

First there was coffee to be ordered, and the obligatory would-you-like-something, no-nothing-thank-you while Sasha cleared an old mug and several napkins away from the shared surface.

Then just as the redhead was pulling her chair back, Sasha’s voice sounded, pitched loud and clear. “I only agreed to meet with you to say I can’t do this anymore. My husband is in Iraq, stationed in Basra.”

The other woman stopped, looking as though she had been socked in the gut, halfway between heart torn out and tight-lipped anger. Sasha studied the table, tracing a finger across the constellations of blue stars. She looked as though she were worrying over a grocery list rather than declaring an end to a romance.

In the other woman’s blank face, her eyes were a shuttered, washed-out blue. The Universe watched as the painful moment played itself out, watched with a grim and inexorable regard that I was glad was fixed on Sasha and the stranger rather than on me.

When the redhead had vanished onto the street without a backwards glance and the door had jangled shut behind her, Sasha claimed the untouched latte and croissant.

“
Pig,” I said from my seat.

“
Don’t you have some gathering of finger-snapping beatniks to get to?”

“
I’m writing a poem about you right now. I’m calling it ‘Sweet Goddess of the Dew Drop Coffee Lounge’.”

The name of the shop was originally the Dew Drop Inn, back when it was a bar. As it had passed through the successive hands of owners who had not understood the original name’s charm, it had become The Dew Drop Restaurant, The Dew Drop Donut Shop, The Dew Drop Take and Bake Pizza and most recently, the Dew Drop Coffee Lounge.

In this incarnation, the owner, Mike, had decorated the walls in neo-mystic. Posters showed translucent, anatomically-correct figures with chakra points set like jewels along their forms, backed by Tibetan mandalas. Sunlight slanted in through the crystals dangling from monofilament line in front of the French doors, and sent wavering rainbows across the glass cases by the counter, trembling on the scones and dry-edged doughnuts. Painted stars and moons covered the Frisbee-sized tables.

At first I hadn’t liked the hearts of space music Mike insisted on, but after hours, days, weeks, now months of it, the aural paint of synthesizers and whale song had crept into my thoughts until mall Muzak now seemed strange and outré to me.

Sasha went back to her reading. I got up and started opening the doors to take advantage of the spring weather. The breeze ruffled the foam heart atop Sasha’s latte and tugged at her newspaper. A skinny man in a red baseball cap came in, looking around, and she caught his eye, gestured him over, preparing her next brush-off.

“
Everything’s alchemical,” Mike had told me the week before. We were cleaning out the coffee machines with boiling vinegar and hot water. Wraiths of steam rose up around his form, listening as he spoke.

Whenever we were working together at night, he would deliver soliloquies that explained the secret inner workings of the world. While much of it was dubious and involved the magnetic poles, UFOs, and a mysterious underground post office, it was a world that I found more appealing than my own. More interesting, at any rate.

It was a decent job, all in all, and it paid fair money in an economy that was so tanked that my already useless English degree was worth even less. So I tidied up the coffee shop, carryied ten gallon bottles of water in, swept, and refoldednewspapers after customers had scattered them like ink-smeared autumn leaves. It did mean the occasional late night labor, but Mike was a good sort and helped with the scutwork.

“
Yes,” I said noncommittally. I had learned that the best thing to do with Mike was not to stand in the way of the current rant.

“
The thing is this. You know Tarot cards?”

“
Like fortune tellers use?”

“
Yeah, sorta kinda. See, Tarot cards have pentacles and swords and cups and rods, and that’s diamonds and spades and hearts and clubs. With me so far, yeah?”

“
Yeah.”

“
There’s twenty two cards beyond that. The Major Arcana, they call them.”

“
Aren’t there Minor Arcana too?”

“
Yeah, those are the pentacles and stuff. Anyhow, each Major Arcana shows a step in our life journeys.”

“
Which is how you use them for fortunetelling,” I said.

“
No, well, kinda sorta. But they’re steps that everyone goes through, the stages of life.”

“
All right,” I said. I tipped the jug into a tank and drained it, frothing with heat. I sniffed the steam. Was that a last trace of vinegar?

“
You should write about it,” Mike said. “A lot of great literature is based on alchemy.”

“
Yeah, that’s certainly a thought,” I said. “Is that one done?”

He sniffed at the tap. “Another pass, maybe. Then let’s mop the floor, as long as we have the hot water. Call it a night after that.”

“
The thing is this,” he said after a long and reflective silence in which I’d forgotten what we were discussing. “There’s these Avatars that walk around. They’re foci for the Universe’s attention, moments that get repeated over and over again, like in the Tarot cards. Sasha’s one, for example.”

“
Sasha?”

“
That skinny blonde who comes in around ten, reads and drinks coffee for a couple of hours, turns up in the late afternoons sometimes.”

“
She’s a what?”

“
An Avatar. It’s the shop. It’s a Locus.”

“
I thought you said it was a
foci
.”

“
No, people are the foci. The Avatars. The shop now, it’s a
Locus
, a place where foci converge. Like Stonehenge, where all the ley lines meet.”

“
The Dew Drop is like Stonehenge?”

He laughed. “Yeah, crazy, isn’t it? I don’t understand why, either.” He pulled a bottle of whiskey out from behind a blocky pyramid of stacked coffee bags. “But we’ll drink to it all the same.”

The next day, I watched Sasha.

It was a little before ten, a slack hour with only a couple of customers. I appreciated the lull, since I was hung-over and queasy from last night’s drinking.

A kid came in, maybe fourteen or fifteen. He had long brown hair tied back with a red bandana, bell bottoms, the kind of teenage body that looks like one long stick. He slouched in the doorway until she gestured him over and said something.

His jaw dropped.

I’d always thought that was a figure of speech until I saw him go literally slack-jawed with surprise at her words. And I would have said something, done something, but I felt it. The weight of the Universe’s attention, just for a moment, not on me, but so close that you’d think space and time had collapsed at the point where Sasha sat, looking up at the kid.

He turned and pushed past me to the door. The back of his jacket had a picture of a chimpanzee with the legend “Got Monkey?” under it.

I gave her a little wtf? look and she shrugged at me and went back to the paperback she was reading,
The Biggest Secret
. But fifteen minutes later, another person came in, an elderly woman carrying a yellow flower in her hand.

She was taken aback by Sasha’s wave, and made her way over to the table like someone advancing to feed a stray dog that they don’t trust. Sasha stood and held the chair out for her, but the woman shook her head, laying her daffodil down.

“
He’s not coming,” Sasha said. “He’s happily married, and he asked me to break it to you. He gave me a little money to buy you a coffee, a pastry perhaps.” She fumbled with her wallet.

“
No,” the woman said. She wore a lavender pants suit and was carefully made up, her colorless hair freshly combed and set. “No, that will be all right.”

With chilly dignity, she left.

“
That was awful!” I let Mike take the register and sat down across from Sasha, indignation pulling at my vocal cords. “What the hell was that all about?”

“
It’s my role in life, sunshine,” she said.

“
You pretended to be someone else! You’re interfering in those people’s lives!”

“
It’s not as evil as all that, Clay.” She pointed at the front entrance. “It’s something about this place. Maybe it’s the dumping ground of the Universe but I noticed it when I first started coming here to get coffee and read. People come here to meet blind dates that never show up all the time. I’ve never seen anyone actually meet here, but I’ve seen plenty lingering in the doorway, looking around, trying to catch your eye to see if you, you’re the one.”

She leaned forward. “So I started leaping into the breach. I give them a reason to run, to have a story they can tell at dinner parties for the next few years, the Blind Date from Hell, who seemed so nice in e-mail, then turned out to be…” She twisted her hand. “…a little cuckoo.”

“
You’re not just a little cuckoo, you’re insane,” I said. “There ought to be a law about people pulling crap like that. How many dates have you thwarted?”

“
You’re not listening. I don’t thwart them. They only show up here if the other person isn’t arriving.”

“
Bullshit.”

“
Watch.” She pointed at a small ginger-haired man as he stepped in. “I can spot them a mile off. I can hear it in the cadence of their steps coming along the sidewalk and read it in their faces when they open the door. But I won’t catch this one, and you’ll see what I mean. He’ll linger and wait.”

I rose and took his order, a double espresso. He wore horn-rimmed glasses and a robin’s egg blue cashmere sweater. He looked around as I prepared the coffee, glance falling on Sasha. She didn’t look up, just kept on reading.

He took the drink with a thanks and sat down by the door, checking his watch. Each time someone came in, he looked them over. After forty minutes and a dozen people, he drained the coffee and exited, shoulders a tight line of anger.

I went back over to Sasha, not sure what to think.

“
See?” she said.

“
How can you field all of them?”

She gestured at herself. “Online I could be anyone.”

“
So you stand in for the men too?”

“
Sure.” She licked crumbs from her fingertips.

“
How do you make them think you’re the same person they’ve been talking to?”

“
They come pre-fooled,” she said. “Ready to drop into the seat and talk to the one heart in all of the universe that knows them.”

“
You disillusion them.”

“
I teach them what the world is all about. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and what you can laugh at, you can live with.”

“
Is this tied in with that crap Mike was spouting last night? You’re an Avatar?”