Fiction

Lt. Miner sat alone under the awning of a small coffee shop. The angle of the sun didn’t permit any shade, so he sat exposed to it. It hung low on the southern horizon, just above the graveyard on the top of the hill. That was the direction Lt. Miner faced: toward the sun, toward the graveyard, toward the hill.

Lt. Miner drank his coffee and drifted. The sun was damn hot. It moved in a slow whirl to the west.

Lt. Miner started to daydream.

“There was one point, when we were young, that I hated you,” he said to his wife. “The summer of 2004. I hated you, then.”

A rivulet of sweat formed at Lt. Miner’s right temple. The sweat was damn annoying. It bubbled across his forehead. It dampened the small of his back and the armpits of his dress shirt. What a bastard, that sun.

Lt. Miner, under the heat of the sun and the heat of his coffee, could see the red armchair he was sitting on, his wife on the couch to his right.

“There was one day, one morning. I woke up and went to the bathroom. On my way to the bathroom I saw you naked on the floor. I walked down to that coffee shop on the corner and sat there, drinking coffee. That was in fucking August, and for some reason, probably because I was stupid from shock, I ordered a coffee. I sat there, sweating like a maniac. Couldn’t even cry. Drinking a near-boiling cup of coffee and just sweating the shit right out through my pores. And in my head there was a three ring circus: God, Christ, You. I called you a million names.

Whore. And then I imagined marrying you and being married to you, and I felt like a fucking schizophrenic.”

“And then you did marry me,” his wife said.

He broke from the dream, stood up, and walked away with his coffee in hand. The lake was three blocks away. He headed in that direction, thinking he might go for a small walk.