Fiction Fix Seventeen

37
Fiction Fix
short for his first name, Mitchell. He taught
band, though at this beginning stage of music,
they formed more of a pubescent pack with
continually dragging tempo.
Truthfully, Mitchell had been afflicted
almost instantly by Bree as he waited daily for
the Americanos. Morning after morning, he
could feel the sticky, honeyed amber of infatuation
spread through him, newly wonderful as
spring and, simultaneously, debilitating as flu.
He felt like an oversized fifth grader secretly
mooning over some girl.
It had taken some time and nerve to get to
this dinner invitation. Sort of like building a
slow bridge with snippets of conversation and
coffee and warm soy milk as the girders. The
small, wiry self-revelations they shared over
the coffee counter seemed odd individually,
but gradually accumulated into wispy, rather
pleasing pictures of each other.
“I’m not gay,” he had told her one morning
while he waited for his order.
She grew up in Indiana, she said. “Weird,
but I always feel like I need to apologize for
that fact.”
He was allergic to eggs.
She was enrolled in Cortiva Massage
School and would begin next quarter.
This was his second year of teaching. Call
him crazy, but he still believed in public
schools.
She was pet sitting her brother’s two
show-winning Corgis for two weeks, and they
were a pain in the butt. She, herself, was a
cat woman.
One morning, after the coffee rush ended
and she came from behind the counter to
wipe tables, they’d had more time to talk. He
watched how lightly she moved, as if shed
of blood and bone and, instead, filled with
packing foam. At one point, he heard himself
ask if she wanted to come to his house for
dinner, and he heard her answer, Yeah, and
by the time he’d located a clean paper napkin,
his hand was shaking slightly as he drew her
a map and wrote out his address, then on
whim, crossed out the of Java so the bottom
of the napkin simply read Joy.
Standing in the threshold of his doorway,
Bree tucked her hair behind an ear. She
inhaled for effect. “Smells great. Somebody
must have shown you around a kitchen or two.”