resound :: III
The Minutes Before Twelve;
FANDOM: N/A :: Original Fiction
CHARACTERS/PAIRINGS: female speaker, 1 woman, 2 men
RATING: PG.
WORD COUNT: 1003
PROMPT: A Personal Epiphany
SUMMARY: Sometimes there's a factor you can't always see.
ADDITIONAL NOTES: Written for lit class. It was pretty good though, so I thought I'd share.
Rewritten;
piece by piece, one foot then another
Today is a slow morning. The lofty Starbucks I've welcomed myself into does not reflect the inviting atmosphere so often associated with coffee shops on this November Tuesday, and the only noises in this place come from powered-on whirring machines behind high counters and wordless tunes emitting from ceiling speakers. A woman, hair aflame in a high red ponytail that so contrasts her forest green apron slouches low in a direction away from my view. Her mind is on something else, I notice; her eyes are glazed over, her peculiar glance focused on one of the CDs on a nearby shelf. She snaps out of this trance soon after, content to turn her back away from me and lean against the side of the counter.
From my chair I envision her filing through the monotonous dirt encrusted beneath her fingernails, just as weary of this particular hour of the day as I am. The silence, bordering on the brink between obscene and isolating, doubles with every moment spent in its choking hold, and it is all I can do to stay quiet, and leave it be as she stands at her post, glancing every so often over to me in my corner chair. It’s unnerving, the cold look in her eyes. I shift in my seat.
It’s not long after that the uncomfortable silence between us is broken with the appearance of a customer. The man, pushing the brink of six feet but no higher, dressed to impress in his shiny penny-loafers and suave suit jacket over a white t-shirt walks smoothly over to the counter. He pulls a five from his wallet and asks for a drink I do not catch the name of. She doesn’t even look up at him, merely punches in his order, pulls a cup from a tall stack beside her and files his money away in the register and hands back his change, a curt thank you all she says before sliding away to make this unknown concoction.
I can’t bring myself to believe that obvious rudeness she’s expressed is intended, and apparently, neither can the man who she’d done it to. He shakes his head, walks away, and sighs, now content to lounge in the leather chair beside me. He pulls out a phone, clicks it on. He gives me one quick look before disregarding my presence altogether, content to do whatever his miniature computer of a phone will do.
I change my focus from this young man to the fire-headed woman behind the counter again, the coffee shop now bustling with the whirrs and beeps of hard working machinery. The drink she prepares is white, thick with what looks like ice and milk and cream, soon after topped with whipped cream and drenched in rich caramel. I know this drink. The man steps forward with the calling out of what I take to be his name, Greg, and then steps out of the store with one nod just as quickly as he’d come in. It is again only us; this red-head woman and me.
Now the moments pass even slower than before, content to linger longer than even the moments before the final school bell or even the ones before the announcing of a great prize. There is tension in the air. I can feel it, see it in this woman’s eyes. The clock comes up on twelve now, and this is my planned time for departure. I know not why she lingers so excitedly now, but an inner tuition tells me and I am not the only one who will shuffle out of this place at the strike of noon. We will wait, then. Wait for whatever we wait for.
She stares openly at me now, a kind of passive aggressive squint in her eyes, not saying a word. I stare back. I am no longer threatened by this woman, but intrigued by her rudeness, and something tells me I have nothing to fear, at least, not from her. So we stare, eyes unlocking soon after when I tire of trying to figure out what about me she finds so worth looking at. (Perhaps I should have taken note of the fact that I’d sat in this place for over half an hour now, and had yet to order anything.)
The clock strikes the hour a lot faster than I’d expected, and as I gather my gear: my pen, my paper small cup of water - she practically bursts through the front doors, waving once at someone in the back room I’d had no previous knowledge was even there. I watch as she turns a slight corner, getting up slowly to follow her figure down into the waiting parking lot.
A car, black, new and shiny rolls up near her, a male figure in the driver’s seat. The window slides down, revealing his half-covered face, and it is not long before he lifts his body upward to meet her face. She smiles now, a far cry from the blank and pessimistic stare she offered before, to give him a long kiss; I inwardly sigh, noting her happiness and realizing why the minutes before twelve were as long for her as they were for me.
I never saw the woman again, and I doubt I will, at least anytime soon. I wonder about her and her male fellow sometimes; what they’re doing now, or where they’d gone at the end of her shift. Her life truthfully had very little effect to mine; nothing she did was worth noting under any other circumstance. I will however, always remember why she was so moody and anxious to leave that day; why people are always so moody anxious to leave. Sometimes there might be another factor that you don’t take into account. Sometimes, when you don’t know what’s wrong with people, there’s a man outside their workplace, sitting outside and waiting to bring them that joy they’ve wanted all day.