Never Closed

A Story by J.M.Kauftheil

Urban adventuring

And there we were - It was late, we were fed, and we were adventurers. The ground was wet as we walked out of the diner, but the clouds had given up their activity of raining for the night, and had taken to mindlessly drifting. We were doing the same.

I'm not sure what time it was, but it was "tomorrow". It had been "yesterday" when we had walked into the diner, and "today" was lost somewhere amongst a few cups of coffee and a plate of appetizers. We weren't too hungry, but we had gotten food because 24-hour eateries are made for people who have no place to be after hours, and that defined us rather well on most nights. Such was the story of tonight, yesterday, tomorrow.

"One of the things I learned during my semester in college," I told Steven, my less educated comrade, "is that coffee in an okay drink." His lack of university learning had left him drinking root-beer. We had already gotten sodas earlier at a convenience store - another all-night establishment. Though we had to open our Cokes with his house key, we had opted for glass bottles, because the superiority of taste over plastic and aluminum was something you learned in grade school.

"Coffee is best," I continued later with my scholarly insight, "when it comes in a novelty mug, or a styrofoam cup," I had gotten a cup to-go at the diner, and I was waiting for it to cool off. As I mentioned before, the ground was wet and we were ambling aimlessly. We avoided the snails that rejoiced in the moist sidewalk - nature was also in on the all-hours scene.

"That's a paper cup," Steven said. He was right. True to my teachings, when I finally took a sip, I found my beverage mediocre. We decided to sit down on a curb in front of an elementary school. Steven went to urinate on a tree, because as I've also previously stated, we were adventurers, and that's what adventurers do. When he returned, the tree belonged to him.

We sat a while, and I drank my sub-par, black paper cup brew. I mentioned something about a goat herder in Africa discovering coffee beans, and let it fade into obscurity. It was trivial trivia. We lied back to look at the sky, and used my backpack as a pillow. It was a good pillow for a wandering adventurer with a cup of coffee who was spending the night going in circles.

We rested for a while longer, and didn't say much. The sky was wide open, and it was nice knowing there were places like that on earth - always open. We sat up and I tossed the left-overs of my cup into the street and some steam floated into the air. It faded into nothingness because it was trivial. We stood up.

"Do you mind sharing joint custody on the tree?" I asked. The coffee was going through me. We were adventurers. It was already wet. The tree was open.

As we walked, we still had no place to be, and maybe he snails didn't either. Regardless, Steven stopped to help a few along their path. It felt nice to be providing the service. One of the snails was climbing up a picket fence.

"Steven's Snail Taxi Service," he sang, tunelessly. "We're never closed."