This Aint No Coffee Shop

 

 

 

This aint no coffee shop, hunny. 

F**k you.  Fuckyoufuckyou. 

The lights were dim but the little hooded lamp over the pool table near her was just enough.  She held her notebook like a shield—it was, in a way—before her as the pen spun over page after page.  No great inspiration, just quoted lines.  Effortless bits of conversation spewed from drunken lips all around her.  She didn’t record conversations, what would be the point in that?  Random verse made its way from her ears to her brain, then immediately through her nervous system and out the pen onto the page.  Quips, foibles, slang and come-ons.  She stopped only to slug from the bottle of beer before her, replaced every so often by the greasy-haired sow (this aint no coffee shop, hunny) moving here and there with her tray when she bothered to step away from the half-comatose men at the bar.

 

 Effortless banter, so it seemed to her.  More than she could make, more than she could produce if you put a gun to her head.  The waitress slammed her first beer against the table like a fist on a punching bag, making her contempt for the dark, silent freak customer known without saying a word.  But words mean so much more, don’t they?  And she had not been able to come up with a response to the waitress’s words—harmless as they were (…coffeshop, hunny…) by themselves.  No, it had taken her a full five minutes to come up with a response, only because a woman from two tables over had uttered them for her.  She hadn’t meant to.  They had been meant for the grabby-handed b*****d in the Red Sox cap and button-down blue shirt from which the sleeves had been raggedly cut off. 

“F**k you, Maggot!  Goddamnit you just better keep yer hands where I can see ‘em!”

F**k you she wrote furiously in her little notebook, her book of comebacks, her list of things she’d always wished she could say but…well…couldn’t.

 

She paused, emptied her beer, and raised the bottle in the air hoping the old b***h behind the bar would notice.

 

 

 

 

 

Reviews

[Idyllwyld]

Haha! Ah, I've certainly felt that way, and I've got my own list of such things. But I can relate...some minds just cannot create out of their own volition. But, they can gather pieces, snippets here and there, and re-assemble them into their own image and produce, from this collage, something still wonderful.

Alchemy.

Cheers to her.