WHO: Alex Veicht and Eve Karvan WHAT: Books and coffee WHERE: Spot Coffee WHEN: Tuesday. Afternoon. RATING: PG? STATUS: Incomplete.
Eve didn't drink coffee. She liked the smell of it well enough and found it vaguely reminiscent of illegal dorm room kettles, but she'd never come to enjoy the taste. This was why she'd opted for a more childish version of the grown-up drink and sat herself near the window, book in hand, inhaling the vague scent of hot chocolate cooling in a broad, white cup. The book was far from captivating and the ever-present hum of voices kept tugging her away from Neruda's fascination with love and loss. She set the small collection of poetry aside in hopes that no one would guess what it was. A more appropriate novel for public reading was her copy of Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle - absent both cat and cradle and torn around the edges where many previous owners had abused the novel.
It wasn't their fault; there was something perversely pleasurable about leaving your mark on printed pages, like marking another link in a memorable chain of readership separating the book from its inevitable journey to a recycling facility. Or a garbage heap. She imagined the whole thing as a perilous quest, some sort of Peter Jackson-created CGI heaven, where the book was powerful and its readers mere vessels of its strength. And yet detachment from materialism won out, as post-consumerist norms must, and the book would perish into the fires of its own private Mount Doom.
Eve bit her thumb to hide a private smile and focused, instead, on the fathers of the atomic bomb. It didn't seem like an appropriate subject to be laughing at, but then neither did she want to appear as if she was mocking the other people in the coffee shop. The woman with the brightly-colored pomeranian might have been amusing, but Eve wasn't in the habit of making others uncomfortable. The waitress who had dropped three cups so far looked as if she was about to cry, anyway, and the elderly gentleman making hissing sounds on his phone no doubt suffered from some nervous tic. They were neither privy to Eve's wandering thoughts nor liable to become undeserving victims of her strange behavior; to her great relief, none had noticed her efforts to control nervous laughter. None, that was to say, excepting the man seated a few tables down.
So much for hiding in plain sight, she thought, striving to bring herself under control and submit to social conventions. Nervous laughter became a tentative smile, became the effort to pretend that she hadn't noticed him at all. Her gaze reverted back to the pages of the book, but Vonnegut had moved on; the narrative was on chapter five now, and Newt's father had only just surprised himself with a made-up game - much like the ones Eve played to make solitude a more exciting adventure.