An Excerpt from “ Thoughtwall Café: Espresso in the Third Season of Life”

by Cameron Miller

A life, a death, and more than one love were born in this café on a single day.

Any café is a universe unto itself, a constellation of never-touching planets and stars, intersecting objects that land with fierce impact or disappear unnoticed in the atmosphere, all of it surrounding each person as they come and go. Even in the humblest café, incidents of life and death abound, love and friendship, too, but at the spot, even the mold spores on the floor come and go with greater frequency than most. Few have the eyes to see it, but daily slivers of light are given birth in litters across the darkened space between the lives of café regulars and strangers. This story reveals the universe of unseen relationships and serendipity in ordinary moments, and the never-ending rave inside the mind.

Table 54 — seats four comfortably, plywood top arranged with brio train pieces covered with clear fiberglass resin, and sanded to a smooth finish.

Harrison Jordan, a young man with two last names, liked plain bagels toasted with butter and spread with green olive cream cheese. He didn’t know why he liked them and his catlike mind gingerly pawed the question as he sat, otherwise listlessly, waiting at The Caffeination Journey on Brindle Street for a friend who was half an hour late.

Was it something from childhood, he wondered to himself. Was taste born of circumstance, constructed with the slow deliberateness of experience as genetic code is across generations, or was taste something more whimsical like wind shifting the direction of grass?