by A L Hart
Another thump sounded.
My eyes narrowed, discarding the guessing game. Whatever was down there, whatever thought it could intrude on my father’s shop, had chosen the wrong place. The wrong man. I crept back to my room and retrieved my handgun out of the drawer. Then, on second thought, as the cold, unused steel weighed in my hand with the safety off, a sliver of morality urged me towards a secondary weapon.
My high school’s baseball bat stashed in the closet. The polished wood felt good in my hands, reminding me of hot summer days on the field. The gun stuffed in the back of my slacks felt better.
Who would want to break into a coffeehouse? I ruminated incredulously, stalking towards the ominous mouth of the staircase. I cleared the register every night before calculating net profits, never left anything enviable within sight of the widows. But beyond that, this neighborhood had a low crime rate, one to rival that of the Mississippi boonies, and of all the places some thief could have broken and entered, they’d chosen this shop? Quietly, I grabbed a flashlight from the storage closet at the head of the stairs, not sure if I was angry or just shocked.
Below, something shattered.
Angry. Definitely angry.
I should have called the police, I realized as I was already halfway down the stairs. But then, what if it was a rat? Some six foot grown man ringing up the men in blue over a little sound scare. No, I’d rather not give Natalie something to laugh over.
Downstairs, the main floor was nowhere near as dark as upstairs. The brushes of moonlight filtering through the windows across the floors gave the room a film of tinted blue limn. Everything was bathed in a silvery gloom. I paused at the bottom step, bat in one hand, flashlight in the other, flattening myself against the wall like in bad action movies. I listened.
The owl clock above the entrance door clicked softly. A thick coat of silence owned the spaces in between.
And then I heard it. Voices. Quiet. Unintelligible.
Coming from over by the storage compartment of coffee barrels. Near the back entrance. Nowhere near the register. Yet.
I swallowed, hand tightening on the bat as I set aside my reserve and stalked across the floors towards the sound. My heart was surprisingly steady.
So was my bat.
With a deep breath, I toed onto the scene, finding myself more perturbed than fearful, and that ire quickly congealed into before’s anger, so that when I barked, “Who’s there?” I barely recognized my own sharp tone.
The voices stopped immediately, invoking a deadly silence.
But I knew they were there, and the stretch from the back entrance left no room for them to run and hide. I moved swiftly from my position by the bar and turned the flashlight on, beaming it at the intruders while holding up the bat. I felt every bit like a cop with a baton by the way I held the flashlight at the neck of the weapon while aiming both at . . . two young ladies.
They flustered like a startled flock of birds, scrambling back through the black patches that clung to the stretch—one of them screamed. Or something akin to a mutilated sob.
Words failed me.
All of the called up, polished aggression I’d been summoning skittered away, replaced by stark confusion. The threat I’d been prepared to neutralize was literally nothing more than two women, a good head smaller than me, squinting in fright from the flashlight.
I angled its conical ray onto sections of them. Starting at their feet. Bare. Both of them. Dirt-crusted toes curling as they huddled back into the darkness. One of the women tucked behind the other, trembling visibly. I ran the light upwards, where white leggings of sorts snaked around their slender limbs. The black, layered fall of their skirt gave me the peculiar impression of choir girls—no, not choir girls. Something far more distinct and . . . disconcerting: those old Victorian dolls found in manors like I’d read about in one of Ma’s era-crazed texts. Their tops were charcoal shaded button-ups with straps trailing over their shoulders and down to their waists, buttoned to a cotton black belt tied in a bow on the left of one them and the right of the other.
When I put the light back on their faces, I nearly forgot I was being robbed. Paralyzed at the sheer, ethereal beauty. How their skin could be so flawless, like the lattes the Friday night hippies liked to order. Creamy. An ethnicity I couldn’t place to one distinct continent. The woman in front had black ringlet curls down to her waist and bangs that started to curl into eyes so gray, I felt as though I were peering into a rocky chasm. The woman behind her, I couldn’t really make out her features with her non-stop trembling, face cast down, eyes pinned to the floors as she gripped her partner in crime so tightly it was a wonder the woman didn’t cry out. But she too had inked hair, though it stopped at her shoulders, her fringes far more coiled, heavyset.
They were beautiful in a catalogue way.
Beautiful if you could overlook one thing: sinister, the glossy horns curling from their head.
This made me recover from speechlessness. “What are you two doing in my shop?” Had they just come from some costume party? The nearest university was miles on out of town and Halloween was days ago.
Neither said anything. The one in back didn’t look too well, her features perspired, her weight practically sagged onto the other who supported her effortlessly while staring a particular hatred at me.
Seeing the rich emotion took me off guard, the seething abhorrence lurking in her gaze seeming to strike right through me. As if I’d broken into her establishment. An unnerving awareness moved in those gray eyes, mixed with something more profound. I’d seen the look before, rare though it was, on women who came into the shop, doped on some drug or another.
Was that it, then? Did they come to this laughably remote town, this little corner coffeeshop in the middle of the night looking for a fix? I hated to break it to them, but the best I could offer was a shot of espresso.
We faced off in a bid of silence for a moment longer, but the moment shattered when above, the dim, automatic light over the bar area flicked on. And with this restoration of light, shining the obnoxious flashlight on what was obviously two defenseless women while holding a bat to them and a discrete, loaded gun nestled in my pants, I felt like an utter, complete prick.
Slowly, I backed up. “Listen, I’m not sure what you both are looking for, but find some other place because I don’t have it.” After a moment, I added, “I don’t want any trouble.” I wanted to go back to my routine, write my a journal entry, read a bit until I passed out, wake up to prep for the day before the actual scheduled prep team arrived, and begin the process all over again.
“Ophelia, we have to go,” one of them said softly to the sicklier one who was likely going through some kind of withdrawal. Then, in a harder tone, she injected, “Coming here was a bad idea.”
The Ophelia woman shuddered as though she’d just come in from the freezing rain. Except, outside, the skies were velvet and clear, not a cloud in--
The sudden crackle of thunder nearly had me flying out of my shoes. Its abrupt force took hold of the shop’s body and sent a vibration through its bones, the floors quivering beneath my feet. Rain hadn’t been on the forecast today. I’d checked. I always checked. Not because I was an old man like Natalie accused, but because weather affected business performance and the last thing I needed was to forget to roll out the rain mat, ergo inviting a customer to slip, elicit a sob story in court, and make a penny off my back.
Briefly, I dared a glance to the windows, but the coverage only revealed partial east skies and that old donut shop that I hated purely because Dad had hated it. Its windows were darkened, closed for the night. No clouds hung above it. The storm was closing in from the west, out of sight.
I glared back at the intruders--and was instantly met by a glaring realization. Something I hadn’t noticed until now as they both regarded me.
They looked exactly the same. Twins.
Sisters in crime.
How endearing.
The woman tugged the sickly on
e’s arm, urging her to go.
“But he can help us,” Ophelia whispered, her voice so frail and quiet I almost contemplated calling the ambulance rather than the men in blue.
The other woman’s eyes suddenly went ablaze with a fury I couldn’t even begin to comprehend. Hatred spilled across her features more viciously than before. “This worthless thing can’t help anyone. He’s selfish and cruel, Lia. All he does is destroy those around him and if you think for a second he’s going to heal you, then maybe that lightning struck you harder than I thought.”
I found my teeth were gritting, my hold on the bat hardening. Who exactly were these two to come into my establishment assuming they knew a thing about me? And did she just say her sister was struck by lightning?
“You see?” the woman proclaimed as if I’d just validated her point. The corners of her mouth twisted the slightest into a smile that knotted my insides. “That self-loathing is still in him, that same rage,” she spat.
“You don’t know me,” I said acerbically. This voice, it wasn’t mine. And this feeling inside of me--what was it? This feeling that aligned so perfectly to that which she branded me. Self-loathing? No, I was fine. Rageful? No, I was calm, in control.
I pointed the bat at them. “Get out before I call the cops.”
“Gladly,” she sneered, turning on the balls of her feet to go back the way she’d come, but Ophelia stopped her.
“Jera . . .”
“We’re leaving,” she declared.
“But they’ll find us.”
“Better them than this.”
Outside, the clouds made themselves known. Tumbling thunderheads rolling across the once twilight sky, darkening the night to a portent drear. Wind bristled the debris, licked at the windows, and tried the doors, begging to come in. Above, lightning forked through the gloom, flashing a nimbus glow onto the entire street. Distantly, I noted there was something off about the lightning, something I couldn’t place. Inside, I felt its static charge as though it’d struck from within. I blinked away the misconception. This was what happened when you skipped meals. Delusions.
“I don’t want to be like this,” Ophelia whimpered across the hall, water flooding her gaze before spilling over.
“Then my advice is for you to call someone,” I said, knowing this time I was proving the other woman’s point on my “cruelty.” My patience was wearing to a nub. “Or I will.”
The woman shuddered, her frame doubling over against her sister’s.
“Please don’t puke,” I said sourly. “I just mopped these floors.”
This seemed to fuel Jera’s anger. “You truly are as despicable as they come,” she seethed in a low tenor that rattled beneath my skin more than the lightning had. “Pity my dear sister here can’t see you for the monster you are. The monster you will always be.” Before I could inject a word, she snapped, “You think you can do whatever you want! You think you can break us all--”
“I don’t know you,” I bit out. The two of them were obviously sick upstairs, two lunatics let loose from who knew what ward.
Ophelia appeared pained by my words, a grimace tightening her face. As if I’d actually went ahead and swung the bat at her.
“Do not listen to him, Lia, he’s lying. This is just another of his sick games.”
One hundred and fifty percent delusional. “This isn’t a game,” I quipped. “I don’t know the first thing about you two nutcases.”
“Oh, you know us very well,” she countered with a world of contempt, dragging her sister away towards the exit, but before I could ask how, she hissed, “You’re the bastard who created us.”
And with that, they were gone before I could threaten to file a restraining order.
Ch. 2
Once done bolting the back door shut behind the two of them, I didn’t return upstairs but to my office at the rear of the shop. Sleeping after that was out of the question. My paranoia was nice and high. I still had the bat cradled between my legs, the gun an accessible range within the desk drawer and my awareness on high alert. I’d turned off all of the lights, save the bronze desk lamp sheened over the large oak surface. The month’s planner lay open in front of me, this week’s schedule alignment settled beside it, along with the shop’s computer where I now sat staring at the employees’ clocked hours.
But that was all I did, stared. Processing nothing. Doing nothing.
Except replay the crazy female’s words over and over again in my head.
He’s selfish and cruel, Lia.
She couldn’t be more wrong. At best, I was no one. I was nothing.
“That self-loathing is still in him, that same rage.” Couldn’t have been farther from the truth; she had the wrong man. I had nothing in me. These days I woke and worked until I slept, only to rinse and repeat. I did it all on autopilot. The customers I encountered, my employees I spoke with and the people I met, it was as though I engaged them through a glass, never in the same dimension as them because they had feelings. Happiness and sadness and rage.
Whereas I . . . I felt nothing at all. I was a man trudging through life without purpose, without meaning, without an honest excuse to even bother to feel such a thing as self-loathing or rage.
Outside, the thunderheads finally expelled their insides into a horrendous downpour. The heavy patters rapped against the high, horizontal window behind me, slanting shadow-drops across the computer screen and the dingy floorboards, leaving me in its ghostly films of lighting. Goading me almost.
I ignored it. There were more demanding things in need of my attention. Leaning forward, I examined the available hours Kevin and Minnie had put in for next week. Today was Friday and Saturdays were not so much busy, but most of the staff needed off for one reason or another, leaving just me and two others on shift—Roger, a quiet boy who always took smoke breaks and played on his phone on actual breaks and Renae, a girl so perky and happy, you’d think she drank the merchandise eight times within the hour. She was the reason we got through Saturdays.
She’d put in her two week notice today.
I pinched the bridge of my nose.
Lightning flashed, and with it, the memory of fierce gray eyes, peering at me as if they knew the biography of me. And loathed each line.
How could such a condemning opinion burn so deep in a single glare?
I wrote Minnie in for seven to two, Tuesday and Thursday through Sunday. Kevin had Monday through Friday, as McKenzie—his daughter—had a supposed big school spelling bee. Which she had every other weekend. Supposedly.
Thunder boomed. I thought of the other sister, Ophelia, bent over, her face completely perspired, her voice a kind lilt as she tried to reason with her sister.
And then I thought of how I’d sensed no malice from either of them, even the sister named Jera, who had her opinion of me already shaped out. If anything, now that I thought about it, the way Jera had slightly positioned herself in front of Ophelia as the woman clenched tight to her arm, they’d both seemed far more afraid of me.
Or the bat I’d held up at them.
I wouldn’t feel guilty about that. I mean, what did they expect when breaking and entering? A nice, cozy place to sit while I comforted and saw to their wants and needs?
Except . . . in my calmer state of mind and retrospection, it seemed that had been exactly what the sickly one had wanted. Maybe even needed.
I ran my finger along the edge of the planner, then the ballpoint pen. I wouldn’t feel guilty about this.
But what if they hadn’t been after money or drugs? What if they’d simply needed help and had nowhere else to go?
I’d been quick to bark over my property, protect the last trace of Dad, and Jera had been quick to bark back, protect her ailing sister, but neither of us had quieted long enough to give the other woman a chance to properly speak her piece, as she’d been so clearly suffering and struggling with words altogether.
The rain fell down harder now, laughing, highlighting how I’d just sent two
defenseless women out, not only into the night, but a raging storm. I wouldn’t feel guilty about it. This was my shop, my haven. The last thing I needed was them bringing their trouble into it.
That said, I liked to think I wasn’t a bad person. Especially when someone panicked at the cash register, realizing they were five cents short and I told them hey, don’t worry about it. Or how I kept my gym membership open only so Natalie could get the friend discount. And what about the bird nest right above my shop’s awning? I could have torn the constant source of tweet, tweet, tweet down years ago to spare me the droppings, but instead I watched avian generations occur.
I wasn’t a bad person at surface value, no.
But beneath that, what was I? Was I cruel? Was I self-loathing . . ? The emotional concepts were foreign, as numbness had taken place during the interlude of time between the accident and now. Tonight, I’d felt something, and it wasn’t the grief Natalie had been vying for.
I’d felt fury at the women’s trespassing. An unnatural rage tightening my hand on the bat. Why? Even if it were drugs they were after or money or even my own life, why rage of all emotions? Why not fear?
What if all they truly needed was my help? Dad had always been a fan of taking in stowaways and dropping change he didn’t have into any cup that rattled in his direction.
But what did that old man know?
Kindness.
He and Ma used to like coming up with little wisdom lines, imprinting them on specially made tea bags, and one of his favorites was: all men can be angry, but only a true one can express kindness through the red.
My eyes slipped closed, a breath pushed past my lips.
I felt guilty about it.
With a grunt, I came to my feet. Shut my brain down. And before I could talk myself out of it, I donned my rain trench and a moment later, found myself unbolting my newly bolted backdoor and hurrying out into heavy rain.
*****
It was worse than I thought.