Coffee

Jacqueline’s morning coffee tasted bitter—too little cream. She had been told to cut back, to try taking it black, to lower her sugar intake. You can handle it, she told herself. Out the window, she watched her neighbor try and fail to start his motorcycle, the engine sputtering before a cough of black smoke filled the air.

He came back to her mind; how pitiful he was in her eyes. It had been rude to ignore him, to step back. The look in his eyes at dinner—desperate, pupils dilating at the plates of food—combined with the ravenous way he swallowed the plate diminished his virtues. A gnawing grew in her stomach, the bitter coffee unsettling her. She picked up her phone and began to compose a message of remorse.

No. 128

A.A.A. #4

The morning of the second day, W. had regressed. Or, rather, the procedures in order to alleviate the initial arterial rupture had led to further complications: fluid in his lungs, acute kidney failure that required a dialysis machine, a gastrointestinal bleed the doctors could not locate. It seemed to the nurses like systematic organ failure.

M., his wife, couldn’t bear to wait around for him to die. When she walked in that morning, she was excited to tell him about the stock market—it had gone up one thousand points the day before. Through his oxygen mask, he offered her a smile at this news. Seeing him there, hooked up to machines, feeling pity and a queasy sickness in her stomach she couldn’t locate or name, she turned away from him and toward her eldest daughter. “Take me home,” she told her. “Let him rest.”

Really, she anticipated the satisfaction lighting a fresh cigarette would bring her. As the smoke tickled her throat, she imagined the queasy feeling in her would dissipate, and the world would feel calm again for at least a moment.

No. 016