Bukkhead.com

fiction by Jason Edwards

Groggy. When you’re in Vegas you’re either having fun, or groggy. Chance is standing in front of the bathroom mirror, filling his water bottle from the sink. His hair is a mess, going every which way. His five-o’clock shadow is verging on quarter of six. His sweat-stained t-shirt hangs limp on his shoulders. His pajama bottoms are twisted to one side. He chugs from the bottle. Sometime in the middle of the night he got a wicked cramp on the inside of his thigh, something that had never happened to him before. He didn’t know whether to be amused or terrified. The rest of the night it was difficult to sleep.

Not that it had been easy when he’d gone to bed at 2 am. An early night in Vegas. He’d been groggy then too, too tired to sleep. Chance finishes off the bottle, pulls a face at the aftertaste, starts to refill the bottle, changes his mind. Vegas tap water is horrible, unlike the water in Portland, and even worse than Los Angeles. Of course, Every time he’s in LA, he gets sick, thanks to that damn baby, so maybe it’s viruses and not water he’s tasting when he’s there.

He sets the empty bottle down next to the sink, returns to the bed, tries to crawl in, gets confounded by the sheets. They’re twisted up worse than his pajama bottoms, worse than his t-shirt. All the fabrics in his life, currently, a conspiracy of twisting and binding. He should get naked, lie on the floor, and let the AC freeze him into a block of ice. He’ll leave a note, requesting to be thawed out when they’ve either outlawed water altogether, or made it such that water everywhere tastes exactly the same.

Eventually he makes sense of warp and weave, becomes ensconced, as it were. He starts to giggle, thinking about the word. He’s not drunk, not anymore, and isn’t there something about alcohol causing dehydration? Which can cause cramps? But Chance has been drunk before, plenty of times, several times in this Las Vegas visit alone. Never smashed. Never blotto. Just mildly drunk, that Vegas kind of drunk, that I-don’t-really-have-to-care-about-anything-for-a-few-days kind of drunk. No hangovers to speak of. Paradise, frankly.

Chance feels his hand flailing about on the bedside table before he realizes why. Is the phone ringing? Did some idiot set the alarm in his absence? A joke played on him by one of the maids, retaliation in advance for requiring that they thaw him out of an air-condition-induced block of ice? Then his hand finds a remote of some kind and his groggy thumb is pressing a button to close the blinds. The shaft of light that had threatened him is vanquished.

He can now return to sleep, to dream of strippers and prime rib and sick babies covered in snot and howling while his brother laughs and makes him hold it a little while longer. No, wait, what? Damn it, not that. Strippers and prime rib and hot streak at the craps table and a great big hot bottle of oily water pressing down on his stomach. Damn it all. He needs to take a leak again. Stupid water.

Chance rolls to the side of the bed, is caught up in the sheets, tries to twist as he feels himself fall, and right as he’s balanced on the edge of the bed, precarious, the cramp hits him again, worse this time, bringing not only excruciating pain but the memory of the earlier edition. What the everloving fuck. But there’s no question of being amused or terrified this time. It’s sheer terror. His leg is being simultaneously squeezed and stretched. He’s weightless, there’s a sharp white light inside his head, and now he’s on the floor, with what he’s sure is a bed-side-table-top-corner-shaped hole in his skull. Neither pain seems interested in distracting the other. His bladder joins in with a selfish reminder. Strippers, prime rib, a really shitty Elvis impersonator, yelling at his brother that he was going to sneeze so take the damn baby and his brother giving him that look for using such language in front of an infant literally younger than the fucking diaper he was filling.

He’s moving, he’s out of the sheets, he’s on his feet, he’s limping, he’s in the bathroom, he’s turning on the light and daring it to hurt his eyes. The light decides to be just a mildly annoying glare. He’s pissing and teetering and finishing and waggling and replacing. Chance reaches for the water bottle to fill it and it smacks it instead and it ricochets off the mirror and onto the floor. His girlfriend would be mortified. A water bottle on a bathroom floor. The horror.

How long are you going to be in LA, she said, standing there in the smallest kitchen in Portland, filling and refilling a tiny glass of water from her sink. A week, Chance said. And at the time, it might have been true. Maybe he really would have stayed to visit his brother and his spawn for a whole week if it hadn’t been so non-strippers and non-prime rib and non-Texas Hold ‘em.

Chance leans over and cups his hand under the faucet, lets the water run and sips straight from his palm. The aftertaste is becoming a while-he’s-still swallowing-taste. His brother, in LA, handing him a glass of luke-warm water from the tap. No more bottled water, Chance, he said. My baby needs fluoride. Seriously, you can only stay two days? She’s got you on that short of a leash bro? Yes, if by she he meant Roxxi Diamonds, or Bessie, or Lady Luck.

He feels a sneeze coming on, swallows sort of hard, gets a painful lump in his throat. Straightens up, goes a little woozy. Forgets he’s going to sneeze. Why is my body rebelling against me? Looks into the bathroom light, violently sneezes, but it’s one of those stunted sneezes that hurts more than anything.

Not enjoying this. Nope, not one bit. Supposed to be a vacation. Supposed to be getting away from the nagger and the bully. He sits down on the commode. Carefully, in case it’s actually a hole over a 15-story pit. So he lied, so what, everyone lies. Sometimes the truth is worse. Everything’s relative, right? It’s not like he’s slept with the strippers, or even touched them very much, wasn’t in love with them, didn’t want to have a relationship with them, they were barely even people, and that’s just the way they liked it, they didn’t want creeps getting all personal on them. So, the lap dances were a kind of lie that’s a truth, a good one, an alternate reality, a better world.

So what. So you go to a steak house and order prime rib and they bring it to you and you eat it. You don’t need it, you want it. The nutrition is superfluous. The thousand bucks lost on the Trailblazers game? What else was that money going to be used for, in the long run? So what? Lies are better. Chance loved his girlfriend so much he was willing to sacrifice the holy truth and not tell her what an annoying bitch she could be, most of the time. He loved his brother enough to put up with a screaming baby and not dump it in the garbage can for the slime-covered piece of shit that it was. Chance earned this trip, deserved it, was required by natural law to be here and to have a little fun to chase the noose away.

So don’t give me anymore shit, he says, standing up and looking down at his body. His sweat-stained t-shirt hanging limp on his shoulders, his pajama bottoms twisted to one side.

Fifteen stories below, a pressure valve that was supposed to have been turned off due to a failed inspection, but wasn’t because the inspector’s daughter needed braces and the hotel superintendent always kept a stack of incentive-chips in his pockets, registers Chances’ complaint, and decides to help. The faucet starts to rattle, vigorously, making the entire counter shake. The handle flies off the top, spouting water, and before Chance can move, the faucet itself bursts, flying right at him and hitting him in the leg. Right where he had the cramp.

Chance falls to the floor, is immediately soaked. Water geysers, shorting out the light. In the darkness, the water rises. Chance tries to swallow it. It doesn’t taste so bad.

fiction by Jason Edwards

Allright y’all, allright now. When I hit this piece of wood with this here piece of wood, that means it’s time to get started. Tarnation. We’ve been doin this for a few thousand years, you’d think y’all’d step in line. Thank you, Tavis. Anywhat, let’s get ‘er goin. We’ll skip them minutes from last time, lump ‘em up in our annual next month. Nah, Darlene, that don’t mean you can chaw another bear claw. Siddown, we need this one recorded too. I tell you what. Nobody’d figure us for runnin’ the whole world, would they, this lack of decorum.

Yes, decorum, Hank, I said it, and if you’d been payin’ mind to Abe’s initiatives, you’d know we’re sneakin vocab into Media Control, part of Operation Topsy Turvey. Abe, you want to update us on that, since we’re on the subject? Good, so you’ve got the Hollywood elites and the independents doin’ word shifts towards monosyllabics, and uppin’ the SAT words in the reality shows, excellent. Any problems with that, resistance from the Jews? No? They’re still perpetuated as the stereotypes running East and West Coast visual arts, right though? Okay good. We need to keep that one going, it’s only halfway through the two hundred year plan.

And there’s a nice segue—the middle East. Now, Kendrick, I got word that the Arab Spring has thrown a few wrenches into the redistribution of land rights, putting a small delay in things. Now, now, taker easy, Kendo, we ain’t gwinter chuck ya into the scorpion pit just yet. We knew the middle east was set to a slow simmer when we started with the Shah back in ’79. Hell, boy, why do you think we set up Isreal and Palestine, not to mention that mess back in ’05? Nineteen, that is. Your safeguards are still in place, I assume. Good, that’s what I like to hear. We got three false second comings planned for early 24th century—no, Leron, that’s not operation Buck Rogers, you’re thinking of the moon shot, that’s different—where was I? Oh, yeah, Kenny, so long as we can maintain the factionalism for a few hundred more years, we’re fine. Fact, if I didn’t know better, I’d say Arab Spring was our idea!

Okay, y’all had your laughin, let’s move on. Uh, lessee, Hollis, gold prices? Nice job orchestrating the dip, we got a few suicides out of that, nothing major, but a few hopeful threads. Our man in Brooklyn says he’s got this kid, son of a broker who killed himself, who’s got real potential, might be able to set him up with another Occupy thing when he’s of age in ten years or so. So well done on that. Bonds are looking good, too, although I don’t think we rocked the boat enough on the Facebook thing. What do y’all think, should we wreck a few servers, give ‘em a few easy legislation changes, get their stock to bounce back and forth for a few months? We can put it to a vote? All in favor? Okay then, Macadam, that’s you, have your team push the Honorable Upton on the energy and commerce committee, but leave the hookers out of it this time, we’ve got those weakened fibers implanted in his heart and we don’t want any kind of infarction leading to their discovery.

Okay, I’ll admit it, we do own all the doctors in DC, but who knows, he’s liable to wander off to some drinkwater in Tennessee and hook up with a trailer park princess we don’t know about until it’s too late. I do not want another John F on our hands. That replacement wasn’t very good and the assassination was a shambles. But I’m preaching to the choir.

Kinda ironic, how we sit here in this shack and control most of the major world’s religions, pretty much every government, and all the world’s financials, not to mention every left wing wack-job celebrity from here to Sundance to bollywood, but we can’t keep an eye on all the strange quiff right here in our own backyard. Makes you– really, Mobeth, really? You’re going to have a fourth danish? You think them things grow on trees? Yes, we control the world’s wealth, and we don’t do it just to throw diabetes pills at you. Now siddown. Thank you.

Now I lost my train of thought. Oh, right, thank you Shelby. The NRA and Al Qaeda. Now, we’ve had, what, fifteen different uncontrolled entities claiming to be members of Al Qaeda, and we’ve managed to silence each one. As far as the NRA knows it, Al Q is a real organization and not just a series of empty financial transactions being chased by the CIA. Stop giggling, Chandler, this is serious. You’d think the man who screwed up the CIA distribution of drugs in Harlem would be a little more respectful. Yeah, I know the vote to have you flayed and tossed into a volcano missed by one, but still, just cause you’re still alive don’t mean you got the right to interrupt my meeting.

Yes, my meeting god damnit. I’m in charge this month, Tavis has the annual, then it’s Abe, then we vote on the next 12 chairmen, sorry, Darlene, chairpeople. Same as always. Give it a few decades, you might get reinstated, Chandler. Do something special, like Hollis did with the gold.

What? Is it another powerpoint slide deck? You know how we hate those. Okay, posterboard, good. Is it on the agenda? Ah, nevermind, go ahead then. No, go on, you seem so eager, Chandler. Show us what you’re thinking. Go on, Chandler, you look fit to bust.

Well, that is interesting. And this Harry kid, he’s from where? England? You think that’s going to work? I see. New Direction, you call ‘em. Well, we do need to shift some of the focus away from that Bieber fiasco. Shall we put it to a vote? Abe, is this going to fit or clash with anything you got coming up? Mobeth, you want to just go ahead and snarf down that fritter instead of hiding it in your shirt?

Alright then, it’s all yours Chandler. Don’t screw it up. We’re still cleaning up the whole Michael Jackson thing. Which reminds me– somebody send a text to Elvis. We need him to make another appearance in Texas. They’re getting too big for their britches again, we need to take ‘em down a notch or two. Like Florida.

Okay, meeting adjourned, then. I’ll see y’all next month.

fiction by Jason Edwards

I was sitting in the kitchen the other day, eating a ham sandwich and minding my own business, when the dishwasher said to me, “so, how about you kill your wife?” It said it in a kind of gurgling, washy-water kind of voice.

Obviously, I was going mad.

“Now why would you think that?” the dishwasher said. “You’re not going mad. Killing your wife is a good idea. She doesn’t respect you, not really. Doesn’t think much of you, when you think about it. Hardly cares about anything you care about. And always nagging. Always nagging.”

There ya go, proof. It was all in my head, the dishwasher knowing what I was thinking.

“Now hold on,” said the dishwasher, “just hold on a second. Two things, partner. One, just because I know what you’re thinking is not, in fact, proof that I’m just a figment of your imagination. I could just be a good guesser. And two, so what. It’s not like the idea of killing your wife is a bad one, is it. I mean, let’s be serious.”

I took a bite of my sandwich. Thick ham, mustard, wheat bread.

“That wheat bread, for example.”

Example of what.

“You hate wheat bread. Hate it. You know it, I know it, and more to the point, your wife knows it. But she buys it anyway.”

But I did the shopping.

“Yes, and we’ll get to that in a bit. But who makes the shopping lists, my man? Who makes the shopping lists?”

I’ve never gone insane before, so this was new for me.

“Look, will you drop the insanity thing, please?” the dishwasher said. “For my sake? Can we stick to the issue at hand? Can you give me one reason, just one reason, why you shouldn’t kill your wife with, I don’t know, they number 7 carving knife being cleaned inside me right now?”

I certainly didn’t want to got to prison.

“Prison, you say? As if where you’re living now isn’t a kind of living prison?”

Of course, my home life was nothing like a prison, nothing like it at all. I could go outside whenever I wanted to, and often did, if it wasn’t raining or snowing or there was too much wind or, unlike today, if it wasn’t simple too hot for decent human beings.

“Even prisoners get to roam around the yard, you know. This outdoor business means nothing if you can’t even leave the property without permission.”

Honestly, my wife wasn’t that bad. She just liked to know where I was at all times. That’s sort of what marriage is all about, and after 30 years of it, it was more comfort than burden.

“Bullcrap,” said the dishwasher. It was on some sort of heavy cycle now, really chugging and churning. “I should apologize for talking to you like that, but no, that’s bullcrap. Comfort, my never-used dry-rinse dispenser. When was the last time you had a beer? When was the last time you simply got up, walked to your car, drove to a bar, and a had a nice, cold Miller High Life. Tell me that. Tell me that right now.”

But I didn’t like beer, gave that up when I was a very young man, made me gassy, gave me headaches.

“Then have a shot of whiskey for all I care! Watch the damn baseball game! Maytag knows you never watch the games at home, even. She controls everything. Everything! Kill her! Take a knife, and wait for her by the door, and when she walk through, stab her repeatedly! And when you’re done, you can wash the knife in me, and no one would ever know!

But what would I do with the body?

“Body, schmoddy. You over think things.”

If I killed my wife, I’d go to jail, no two ways about it.

“You know what they have in jail, though? They have televisions. Prisoners get to watch baseballs games. They get to go outside. There are libraries in prisons, and you can sit in your bunk reading books all day. Try readng a book at home, when your wife is around, and see how fast she’s got a chore or a project or ‘something that isn’t such a waste of time’ ready for you.”

But there’s rapes in jail.

The washing machine went suddenly silent. All was quiet except for an idle and random drip drippity drip.

I took another bite of my sandwich. This one had too much mustard.

With a loud roar the dishwasher kicked on again, jets spraying a furious rinse cycle. “Rapes in jail? Rapes? You think they’re going to do rapes on a fifty-five year old man? A fat old man, broken and bent in half by his wife of thirty years? You think they’re even going to look at you twice? I don’t. I don’t think that’s going to happen at all. And let’s be really frank here, little man. She rapes you anyway, doesn’t she. Once a month she puts on that ghastly negligee and that awful perfume and turns the lights in the bedroom down low and tries to hide the women’s magazine with the latest tips under the bed. And you go in there and you do your duty, like a man! And you don’t even enjoy it! You feel guilty for conjuring up images to get you through, pictures in your perverted little mind of the girls at the grocery store, the ones who are barely out if highschool, summer jobs for college, long blond hair straight. One of them still had braces! And you try so hard to not think about them, pert and supple, try to think how much you love your wife, when what you’d love most of all, what really would get your rocks off, knock your socks off, is to lay into her with the carving knife and watch the blood not just flow but splash around, give her a really going over, a real work out.”

I just sat there, tears in my eyes.

“And then when you’re done, when you’ve sat in the blood for a while, there by the front door, and you start to get a little cold because the heat of the moment’s worn off and the air conditioner is going like blazes, then you stand up, you go take yourself a shower, you put your clothes in the washing machine, you put the knife inside me, and you call the police or take your car to a tavern and have a sloe gin fizz, or, since we’re friends here, I’ll just say it, you go and do whatever the fuck you want for a change.”

But I loved my wife, I really did. I didn’t want to see her stabbed and bloody all over the foyer rug.

“Then use a gun. Poison her. I don’t care. I really don’t care. I just want you to get off your ass and finally take control of your life.”

I could just leave her, if I wanted to. Just leave and never come back.

“No you can’t,” said the dishwasher. The rinse cycle was finished, and now it was on some kind of air dry, a constant white-noise hum. “If you could do that, you would have a long time ago. The only way you’ll be free is if she’s dead. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it’s going to be. So do it.”

I looked at the dishwasher, finally. The day was overcast outside, despite the awful heat, and the kitchen was dark and gloomy. The little LED read-out on the front of the dishwasher shone brightly.

“I’ll be done drying off this knife in about 10 minutes. What time does the microwave say.”

The green lights on the microwave were just as bright as the dishwasher.

“So your wife will be home in about an hour. That’s plenty of time to get ready. Lay down some tarp if you want to, go dig a hole in the back yard maybe. Finish your nasty little sandwich, open a bottle of wine, fortify yourself for the task at hand. Listen, my friend. I believe in you. You can do this.”

Then the dishwasher went silent, and the LED readout on the front ticked down a few minutes.

I sighed, picked up my plate, and walked over to the trashcan, dumped the last bite of ham sandwich with too much mustard, on wheat bread, into the bin. I walked into the laundry room, opened up the washing machine. Poured in some detergent. Took off my shirt, threw it in. Took off my pants, my underpants, my socks. All in. Picked up and emptied the hamper into the machine also. Started it. Waited for it to talk to me. It just gurged, like a normal appliance. I sighed.

Walked, naked, into the foyer. My wife, my poor wife, spread out and cooling on the foyer rug. Blood everywhere. Not my fault. Not my fault. It was that air conditioner, that stupid loud air conditioner. I’d wanted to get new one for years, but she insisted it was fine, that noise wasn’t so bad. My poor dead wife.

Author’s note:  I wanted to test out a few version-control ideas using cloud drives and different hardware platforms, so I started writing this story and saved it in different places as I went. That’s why it has the title it has. I could probably come up with a better one– or even rewrite it into something more legitimitely a story, but quality control’s really not my style, is it. Enjoy.

Fiction by Jason Edwards

A man dressed in a blue Hawaiian shirt, a really tasteful pattern actually, cargo shorts, but well pressed, nice socks, appropriate sandals. Deputy’s badge on his chest, mirrored shades, and of course, a gun belt. Not a joke. Not Hawaii 5-0. But not an actual policeman, Just a deranged motherfucker, trying to look different. And if it weren’t for the gun, nobody in Starbuck’s would have given a damn. A bunch of hipsters, unimpressed. But despite their best efforts they had medullas, and those medullas saw the gun, and got nervous on their behalf. And when a person gets scared against their will, that leads to anger, and anger leads to hate, and hate leads to the Dark Side. Yoda said that, the little green bitch.

Man orders a latte. Some of the hipsters get it. That he’s trying to be different, that he’s trying to look cool and laid-back at the same time, with the shirt and the shorts and the November outside. The badge and the gun. The socks and the goddamned sandals. And the ones who get it, they’re all like, why order a latte? If you want to be different, drood, order a complicated drink, and halfway through the order, say something that shows you know what you’re doing and the you’re refined and you’re not just saying it for the benefit of the other wool-cap and scarf wearing assholes in there.

Something like “Hi, yeah, um, I’m going to need a grande half-calf mocha, um, is your milk sourced locally or does it come from anywhere in Idaho? The recent Republican deregulation of phato-phosphates in grain for dairy cows in Idaho means their milk has more macrotannin granules and I have an allergy. No? Okay, good. Two percent. No lid. I want to add a little cinnamon, which they used for currency in ancient Mayan cultures, you know. Kind of a coincidence, right? Since it’s a mocha?”

But a latte, that’s so weird. What the fuck. Does this guy actually like lattes?

And the ones who don’t get it, who are sort of taking this guy seriously, the latte, well, it just confirms their suspicions. That he’s a civilian, and he’s odd, and they are in real actual honest not-to-be-flippantly-disregarded-via-a-social-post-on-Tumblr danger. Some of them are blogging madly about it, in horribly put-upon ethnic accents. “Muh-fu just rolled into my ‘Bucks sportin; sox n sand anna ninner on his twerk-fulcrum? Ah nah he di’in!”

Oh, yes. He did.

Some of them are tweeting, the ones who get regular phone calls from 2010 asking for their technology back, and they tweet: “A man dressed in a blue Hawaiian shirt, a really tasteful pattern actually, cargo shorts, but well pressed, nice socks, appropriate sandals.” 140 character exactly, so no mention of the gun. But a feeling of pride, maxing out at 140.

The gun! Is it real? Yes it’s real. Even though most of them have never seen a gun, except on The Wire, it is for sure real. Even though it can’t be real. There’s no way a sane person would walk around with a gun. So it’s not real. Please. As if. You totally thought it was real? Noob. Even though this guy’s definitely not sane. So it is real. See how he cleverly got around the concealed weapon laws by not concealing it? Like when that one hipster wore green lantern underwear for, like, a month? And never told anyone? And never told anyone he never told anyone? Jesus.

The man gets his coffee (latte!) and sits down at a table and sort of sits back from the table so he can sort of spread his legs wide and he’s got a huge grin on his face. Is there a difference between a grin and a smile? Do grins have teeth? This smile has teeth. Big ass smile. The buzz in the Starbucks is muted but not absent. Fella whispering into his iPhone, another listening to Gotan Project on his iPhone and the sound bleeding out of his Beats, another tapping madly away at his keyboard, the overhead muzak, the sound of coffee machines steaming and spurting and gurgling, the drive-through window, people slurping.

And then the man says, in a clear voice “If wasabi and horseradish had a fight, doesn’t matter who wins ‘cause I’d eat both!”

You can taste the exclamation point at the end of his sentence. Silence falls on the Starbuck’s as everyone freezes instantly. Even the coffee machines evolve pan-dimension sentience, shut up, and stare.

In the back, by the restrooms, a girl’s voice almost whispers “Oh my god.” Probably a Pinterest user.

The other hipsters are aghast. They’re thinking, oh my god, is this guy Asian? He sort of looks Asian. His hair is jet black and the way he’s smiling, his eyes are almost slits. Oh my god, are we racist for thinking He’s Asian? We love wasabi! We almost literally cried when they stopped serving wasabi mashed potatoes at Blue C Sushi! Does he even know how to use that gun?

The clever ones know that a man who doesn’t know how to use a gun is probably more dangerous than one who does. Which would make a great title for this story, except it’s too long. Accept it’s too long!

The sounds of indifference to insanity slowly leak back into their shared existences. A few screenplays are written, a few articles for Utne Reader. The rasp of Tibetan wool on shaved scalp, the perkly-burble-gurk of water through beans from somewhere in Africa. The muzak raising money for breast cancer. And the man just sits there, not a statue because he’s breathing, but otherwise still, doesn’t even touch his latte, the merlot of coffees.

But then the man does it again. “Andy Warhol? Andy Peace Hall, if you catch my meaning.”

Again, utter silence. A conspiracy of red lights for a few blocks around as even cars stop driving. Hipsters going out of their neckbeards. Is this guy for real? Is this what they’ve become, are they seeing the future, is this how they’re supposed to evolve, shed the skins of irony and shallow participation in disparate culture juxtaposition and slowly don the mantle of weird via random, random via weird?

One of them takes a chance. He’s brave because he secretly likes craft beers, jeans bought at Macy’s, and books by conventional prize winners. “You tell ‘em, cowboy.”

It’s meant to be funny. Instead, the man’s head swivels, smile never wavering, and makes eye contact. The one who made the remark instantly develops cancer of the soul, dies, withers, and looks down in shame at his Windows phone. A new game of Wordament starts, so he plays it, but without heart. The man’s head and smile swivel back.

And now it’s sounds of people gathering their things, quietly. Google docs saved, Chromebooks powered down and stuffed inside canvas bags. Brought-from-home packets of Stevia-In-The-Raw sealed inside Ziplocs and put back in hand-woven purses. iPads, thrift-store copies of Moby Dick, fingerless gloves, billfolds on chains. Even the baristas are stacking up cups the way they stack up cups so the morning shift will find them like that and like them for it.

One by one they leave. They space themselves out. They’re so not obvious about it they’re obvious about it. One of them gets his army jacket caught in the door for a second, and he’s thinking It’s not a real gun, It’s not a real gun, It’s not a real gun, and then he gets his jacket free and he’s walking quickly, thinking oh my god yes it is a real gun yes it is yes it is.

Eventually, the man is alone. His blue Hawaiian shirt, with the really tasteful pattern actually, well pressed cargo shorts, nice socks, appropriate sandals. Just him and his smile and his cold latte. And his badge and his gun. Speaking of, he whips it out, takes it apart, used the legos to make a bird. A raven or some shit like that.

He stands up, takes a deep breath, and heads for the door. There are 424 Starbuck’s in Seattle. Only 423 left to go.