Part 2!

The next week she was there, 3:33a precisely, almost-sharp suit smudged a bit, clipboard under her arm, dark red caked under her fingernails. She wasn’t smiling, of course, but I knew she was glad to come.

I wasn’t sure whether she’d show, or if she was precisely real, so I hadn’t made a latte. But as she pulled the door open, I started a pour.

“Hey again,” she said. “Same thing?” She put something on the counter–a weirdly misshapen travel mug. I took it and started to fill. It was obviously old, polished, lacquered bone. “He likes to use his own cup. It turns out he’s an environmentalist; he wants to keep you all going as long as possible.”

As I poured the latte into the mug, I asked her, without looking, without meeting those world-breaking eyes, “how old is this thing anyway?”

“6000 years?” she responded. “Millions? Who can say?” I could hear the joke despite the lack of a chuckle, and I knew that if she could’ve, she would’ve winked.

I turned back with two drinks: one in the mug, and one just for her. She brightened a bit. “Hey, thanks,” she said. “This really means more than you know.”

I waited as she counted out the exact change and slid it across the counter. “Can I offer you a tip?” she asked.

“No thanks,” I said. “Just in case.”

“Ok,” she replied, though I could see it made her sad. “Hey,” she continued, “tomorrow I’m going to meet someone here. Is your oath still holding?”

I hadn’t broken it; I had no one to tell. I couldn’t recall the last person I’d seen, with a soul or without one. “All set,” I said.

“Great! I’ll catch you tomorrow.” She picked up her drinks and started sipping hers from our ugly, spongy styrofoam. As she clicked across the linoleum out toward the door, I swear I could almost see the hooves.

The next night she was back, bone-mug in hand, and took her drinks to sit in a booth. She sipped quietly, looking nervously out the window and avoiding the fuligin BlackBerry on the table. With nothing else to do, I watched her fidget, and so I was taken by surprise when someone else walked in.

This one filled the room the moment she entered. She had working gloves, baggy overalls, and a small trowel hanging from her belt. She wasn’t large, wasn’t impressive in any way, really, but the whole place seemed to bend around her. And as I looked up to greet her, I met her eyes and they were smiling windows onto a sunrise, steady and almost too bright to look into.

She strode up to the counter without glancing at her counterpart at the booth. She put her lean elbows on the leaner counter and leaned, and it groaned slightly under her uncanny weight. “Cuppa joe, please,” she said, and her voice was pure music. “Small today, and oh! are those old-school sugar cubes? Two of those, if that’s alright.”

I had already grabbed the pot of drip and was filling a cup with shaking hands. “Hey, buddy, it’s alright, we're cool” she said as I turned back with her drink, sugar cubes bobbing. “I’m just meeting a friend.”

“I guessed,” I said. “She’s over there,” and I nodded at the booth.

“Thanks, kiddo,” she replied. She took a long drink from her cup, set it carefully back in its saucer, and in one motion, turned and sat across from the other.

“Hey, Naam,” she said, and when their eyes met, I could feel it in my bones. The whole planet seemed to flex like a bow, seemed to lens like light through a bottle. “It’s good to see you.”

“Hey, El,” replied Naam, barely moving. Her voice dripped longing and defeat. “It took a long time to find another place to meet.”

“Are you doing alright?” asked El.

“Oh, the usual,” replied Naam, because that was her name. “Just the daily grinding. I mean, grind.”

El leaned in and put her hands on the table. Naam specifically didn’t take them. “Well, it’s good to see you anyway,” she said, and they started to talk quietly, in a language I couldn’t quite understand.

Part 3 to finish!