What's a Cortado?

Short story. Weird.

“Hey what’s a cortado?”

The drink ticket stares me dead in the eye, a challenge to any new barista. But there’s a line ten miles out the door, and the girl running the front counter is a blur of static. Her arm(strong) stretches out and she plants another three tickets. I swallow hard. It’s hot behind this chrome machine, and it’s a bull pissing heat steam into my eyes. And here I am holding a locked and loaded Portafilter in my hands with no clue how many shots are in a cortado, or what a cortado is in the first place. 

I glance around. A Coachella of angry coffe-wanters are tapping their toes and chewing their thumbs and spinning in circles of rage, all waiting for me, all waiting for this cortado.

I can Google it. I am a 21st Century Digital Boy, I can do this. I reach into my pocket. Another fifty drink tickets appear. With a deep breath, I open my screen when

“Hey,” says a voice like an explosion in my head. He’s right behind me. My body jerks against my will. There goes my phone. Long fly ball. Homerun. It shatters the glass storefront and smashes face first onto the ground. I spin around.

“Yes, can I help you?”

The man’s eyes are blank. Dead, empty. He hasn’t lived since that girl broke up with him on prom night. The receding hairline wriggles as this non-man tries to make an expression, tries to look mad. But he hasn’t felt anything for 30 years. 

“Is there a coffee there for Jim?”

I look up. No the cortado is for Monique. Another 328 drink tickets arrive. They’re all for Jim.

“Yeah, there’s just a couple ahead of you,” I say.

When I turn back to look, he’s gone, eaten by the throb of the mob.

I need my phone. I apologize to the girl running the counter, but she is translucent, and moving so fast, she has stopped moving altogether. So I sneak past her and I think I feel her brush by but I don’t know because she hasn’t moved. I climb over the broken glass and spot my phone, not before cutting my knee. I hold back a yelp and grab it. When I turn it to the screen I see that it’s totally kaput. The hole is the size of the glass, through which I can see through time, the factory child that died to piece it together. Poor girl. She runs an assembly line like a giant sewing machine. A mechanical arm picks her up and folds her into a ball and flattens her into my device.

Then I remember that maybe Siri can tell me.

“Hey Siri, what’s a cortado?”

The phone clears her throat.

“My name is Mark, you fucking sexist,” says my phone, Mark. “You think you can just ask women for everything? They’re not obligated to tell you shit.”

I put my phone back in my pocket and try to get the front counter girl’s attention. She is a black hole now, so I should keep away. Customers fly into her. Guests. We’re supposed to call them guests. Guests fly into her, gupled past the event horizon. Then they redshift, and it looks like a bunch of red people in a ball. Am I allowed to say that? That feels problematic. 

I rush back to the espresso machine. There are a google drink tickets now. All for Jim, except Monique’s cortado.

“Hey is there an order for Jim?”

It’s Jim again, except it’s prom night and mascara runs down his cheeks. It was the 80s, so it makes sense. And his hair fills the room. It’s throttling the guests.

“Sir your hair,” I say. “I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

He shakes his head.

“Everything leaves me,” he says.

And the coffee shop shifts. Invisible gears crank. The coffee shop spins and he stays put. The door opens and Jim and his hair are removed.

“86 Jim,” says the front counter girl. She’s now just a concept and she hurts to look at because she doesn’t look like anything. When guests speak to her they obliterate into hard lines, the things that delineate them from the space around them. Then they explode. 

It’s loud as hell with all these explosions. 

The wound in my knee peels open. 

“You should really disinfect me,” it says. 

“Do you know what a cortado is?” I ask

“Just make a latte,” it says. 

That’s not a bad idea. Besides I’m behind. The tickets for Jim are still up. But I really have to consider our brand. 

Counter girl is an eldritch abomination now. God she’s eating the Jims.

“Is there an order for Jim?” asks Jim, now 5 years old with a big lollipop and a sucker the size of his head.

“Nice overalls, nerd,” says my wound.

“Sorry,” I say. “He doesn’t work here.”

Counter girl is mating with the Jims to create a hybrid superJim 

The Jims are now one mass. strands of time curl off of the amorphous blob, stealing moments as it labors into a spin and takes on mass. I stumble back into the counter as it tears the roof and the walls to wood splinters. The Jims wail in choral unison, an atonal song that writhes through the pores in the bones and poisons the marrow. 

Counter girls is gone now. She never existed. Something removed her from causality. So the Jims are now encroaching on a logical universe by way of their uncreatedness, and being uncreated they are manifesting events with no link to anything real. Nothing is happening because something is happening out of place. 

The Jim drink tickets are gone. The Jims are gaining speed and girth. The blur of their faces in spiral stain my vision. They’re generating gravity. 

Monique’s ticket is still there. One Cortado. 

This might be the end. But I owe it to her to explain how I failed her. 

Wasn’t there a counter girl? Maybe I’m mistaken. 

I snag the drink ticket and call out her name. The howl of wind and Jims deafens me. Nevertheless, I try again. And again. Forms swoop in and out of vision, trapped in the tornado of the Jims. 

“Monique,” I cry. 

A face smears before me. A woman. Not a Jim. Not the crumbling store. She reaches out and snags the espresso machine. She clings with a desperate fight, but her fingers slip as Jims’s gravity tugs at her. Monique is pretty. Maybe I can ask her out?

“Do you have my Cortado?” She asks. 

I swallow hard and shake my head. 

“I don’t know what a Cortado is,” I say. 

She looks at me funny. 

“I don’t either,” she says. “I thought it was a latte.”

Her fingers slip. She screams and plows into the Jims. She is gone. One with the flesh mass. 

Now gravity yanks at me. I’m slipping out from behind the bar. I don’t want to. I cling to anything, everything but my hands always slip. Suddenly it stops. 

My body drops and I spin around. The Jims hover above the blown out roof. They are a million eyes but I can feel them all on me. 

Then with one voice, they speak. 

“We deem you unworthy,” they say. 

A pause. Unworthy of what, I know not. 

But then they are gone. At unfathomable speed they disappear past the firmament’s horizon. And I am alone in a dilapidated building. I look outside for anyone. Any guests. Outside is everywhere with the way the Jims leveled this place. No one is here. No one is home. 

It’s just me, alone in the coffee shop. 

I still have the portafilter in hand. Without thinking, I install it, turn on the water and pour myself an espresso. When it’s done, I give it no more than 5 seconds before I chug it. Espresso goes bad in ten seconds. I learned that from someone. I feel like it was a girl who worked the counter but there never was a girl who worked the counter. 

Espresso is nice. I can taste the tart of the cherry, a subtle sweetness among the earth and wheat flavors. 

It’s nice. 

And quiet. 

I’m a little anxious though. Couldn’t say why.