Dark Roast

What’s more, the coffee was bitter. She liked a bitter coffee, usually, but this went too far. Even with a solid pour of sugar it was undrinkable. She returned to the counter but was too polite to push past a man whose khaki shirt was tucked into khaki shorts. Below the shorts, milk-pale calves bulged. She waited. She didn’t have to look at her watch to know she was running behind. Unreliable, the interviewers would mutter, tapping their pens.

Khaki guy had made the mistake of asking what was in the specialty smoothie. The girl at the counter had pigtail braids and a wide-eyed nervous stare. Couldn’t be more than seventeen. The ingredient list she was stumbling to recite was exhaustive and dubious: açai and spinach and Greek yogurt and espresso and raspberry syrup. That couldn’t be right.

It was getting later still, and the too-bitter coffee was cooling in her hand. A giggling toddler and his mom joined the line, discussing muffins. The kid waved, she waved back. Cute.

She couldn’t wait anymore. Walking away, she tripped over a snarl of cords. Loud-talking bros sat at a table clear across the aisle from their outlets. She wanted to say, Jesus, don’t you see the sockets right next to you? But it was her own fault for stopping for a stupid coffee in the first place, one that was too expensive and too bitter and now too cold. She’d be late for the interview.

It was for a job doing the same work she already did but for slightly more money. She hated the job she had and this one, if she got it, would be no different.

At the door, she tossed the full cup into the trash. She thought briefly about the skittish barista. Would sloshing coffee flood out of the cheap garbage bag when it inevitably split? Would the girl stand crying with the soaked hems of her jeans wicking up gritty brown liquid?

It was hot outside, the sun coming from all directions. Down from the sky, up from the asphalt, horizontally from all the cars baking. The air was full of drifting woodsmoke from fires hundreds of miles away. Raging somewhere up in Canada, burning up the lemmings and chasing away the caribou and traumatizing Indigenous children on unceded lands and god, it was just awful, wasn’t it, but what could she do about it, what could she possibly do about climate change and wildfires?

She felt guilty about the coffee. The beans, probably grown with toxic pesticides that gave the people who farmed them a rainbow of cancers. The emissions and wastes produced to process, package, and deliver the beans. The raw materials used to make every individual component of the coffee machine. Of the shop itself. Of the car she’d driven here and the brimming cup she’d just tossed into a plastic bag destined for a landfill. She was a monster.

She walked across the parking lot, felt the asphalt tugging her shoes. A mammoth in a tar pit, preserved for eons – however long an eon was – but with the whole earth scorched and ashen who would be there to dig her up, to admire her bones? Tragic that no future archaeologist would measure her skull or examine her hip bones to see if she’d given birth. No one would ever try to figure out how she died.

Finally she’d reached the car and when she touched the handle it was so hot she let go immediately. Feeling ridiculous, she tried again. She was approaching unforgivably late.

The car door was locked. There were her keys on the passenger seat, where they’d slipped out of her reusable tote. She would fry now, like a lemming, and she deserved it.

She thought about calling someone but couldn’t think who. She imagined abandoning the car and running away from the parking lot, the irritated interviewers, the city, the state, the country, the planet. There had to be somewhere else.

But there wasn’t and she couldn’t, so with reluctance she walked back to the coffee shop. The khaki guy would have one of those metal things that opened car doors. She’d ask nicely and he’d smile benevolently and then they’d have a meaningless conversation and then she’d thank him too much and then they’d wave and then she’d drive away and then she’d pretend to care deeply about sales strategies. It was unbearable.

When she pulled open the door, air conditioning blasted past her to fill the universe. There was the khaki man smiling at her through a thick blonde mustache, like he’d known she was coming, like she’d always been on her way, like she had traveled her whole life to end up in precisely this shitty coffee shop. He was holding an enormous clear plastic cup filled with what looked like, well, açai and spinach and Greek yogurt and espresso and raspberry syrup. And whipped cream.

Hi, she said. I’m so sorry to bother you, but I seem to be locked out of my car. Do you happen to have one of those....

Of course, he said, holding the door open. He smelled like pine air freshener and hand sanitizer. She walked out, followed by the cold air and behind that the khaki guy, the tech bros, the kid and the mom. A neat line of people headed to their cars.

The barista watched them go, because someone must. She tipped ice into a blender and dreamed of sprouting velvety antlers and slipping out the back, of seeking the mossy wild.