“The Barista” | (What Happens When I Try to Cure Writer’s Block)

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You always find her sitting on the couch in the living room with a cigarette in hand and her feet propped up on the coffee table. She’s put her feet up so many times, there’s now only one small spot on the table that doesn’t have a layer of dust. Your room is the only room in the house that doesn’t reek of cigarettes. At night you tuck “little tree” car fresheners beneath your door. When you go to school, you keep the window beside your bed a crack and replenish an Air-Wick plug-in weekly. To this day your mom doesn’t know about Joey or his sweatpants or his Worn-Out Jeans. It makes you sick to think you’re scared to tell your own mom you could be in-love. But you knew you’d never love Joey. He’d never let his fingers callus from touching you.

 

You walk down to the end of your street and a take a right at the stop sign. You smell the ocean. You’re two blocks away from the beach. You’ve been afraid of the water for as long as you can remember. When you were five years old, your father said there was a creature that lurked in the shallow end. Its face supposedly resembled a great white shark but your father claimed it had the torso of an alligator and legs of a tarantula. You watch waves swell and blemish white before crashing onto the shore. You’re certain the off blue is camouflaging a face and the white is merely a pair of jaws. The bigger the waves get, the more you can see. Now you can make out a pair of eyes.

 

You wonder if the barista likes the beach. She was a mermaid in your dream. She must.

 

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