Coffee & Kafka - Sherry Morris
I’ve always had a weakness for three things: the absurd, beginnings and coffee. This may sound like an excuse for what follows, but it’s simply my unavoidable truth. And while beginnings (with or without the absurdity and coffee) are important, they’re not the part that matters most.
I remember our beginning—the day you walked into the meeting room wearing a smoking jacket and bright purple tie, telling cringy Kafka cockroach jokes. I metamorphasised into a giggling teenage girl and couldn’t look away. You heard my laugh and wouldn’t. I tried to pull myself together—the office was no place to conduct a Kafka kerfuffle. Decent coffee would keep me grounded.
We ended up in the same lift to the same coffee shop and then the same table. You asked how I liked my coffee.
‘Medium roasted–Ethiopian Arabica beans,’ I answered.
‘Excellent,’ you said. ‘A woman who prefers complex flavours’.
‘Certainly more than milk with two sugars,’ was my reply.
We stared at each other. Your eyes were the same milky-coffee brown as Kafka’s.
You regaled me with tales of Kopi Luwak beans while I shook my head and chuckled over the absurdity of Indonesian civets working their digestive magic to create eye-watering expensive cat-poo coffee. The teenager in me returned—maybe Kafka could be funny forever. Except we had too much in common: both married with young children. I shook my head and aged. You said it was harmless to indulge our love of coffee and Kafka, insisted we continue to meet. As we left the coffee shop, your arm brushed against mine. This would be a trial.
I tried to keep afloat, downing cup after cup, unable to give up the coffee shop, our meetings, my home life. I slept badly, blaming the caffeine. When I did sleep, I dreamt of drowning in a sea of bitter dark roast coffee, the acidity burning my skin. Then I’d see you, peering over the rim of the sea with your Kafka eyes. I’d start swimming, but always woke before I reached you.
One day you put down your cup and said, ‘Let’s…’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I snapped.
The light in your eyes dimmed, while I wondered what had happened to my judgement.
I avoided the coffee shop after that. The withdrawal nearly killed me. I lasted a year, then returned. You were there—at our usual table, wearing a top hat, a sprig of Coffea in your lapel and reading The Joy of Cats. Your ringless left hand matched mine.
‘I’m committed to coffee,’ you said offering a chair.
I smiled, thinking about the Kopi Luwak bean. And how it’s the end that matters.
Originally published, in a shorter version, online and in the print anthology Barely Casting a Shadow v1 by Reflex Fiction, 2017.
This story also appears online as part of the 2018 NFFD Flash Flood with a different title. https://flashfloodjournal.blogspot.com/2018/06/descriptions-of-coffee-struggle-by.html
Originally from Missouri, Sherry Morris (@Uksherka & @uksherka.bsky.social) writes prize-winning fiction from a farm in the Scottish Highlands where she pets cows, watches clouds and dabbles in photography. She sometimes reads for the wonderfully wacky Taco Bell Quarterly and her first published story was about her Peace Corps experience in 1990s Ukraine. Read more of her work at www.uksherka.com.
