The next morning she woke up on the couch, scrunched up in a
ball for warmth. The cat had managed to
cocoon itself in the afghan and return to its exact location without waking
her.
She lurched off the couch half-heartedly. Lumbering into the kitchen was easier than
the bathroom, so she made coffee first.
She filled the chamber with coffee beans, then the next chamber with
milk and then the final chamber with water.
All involved trips to the opposite sides of the room. It didn’t seem to be any more convenient than
the old coffee maker, or, for that matter, forgetting the whole mess and buying
coffee from the store.
“It was easy to be dressed and gone before she woke up,” Joan
thought. Based on the timing of her text
messages, the day begins when the hour has double-digits. That would never work for Joan, though. The earlier the better. She liked to leave when there was still fog
and the sun would cut through in certain places during her drive. She never understood why people said that the
sun burned off the morning fog. It
didn’t feel like burning. Burning was
slow. Burning left ash. The sun obliterated the fog. Nothing was left.
The fog had stayed late into the afternoon the day she first
met her. Met her. That isn’t the best way to describe what
happened. Joan hadn’t ever decided what
the best word was. “Discovered” connoted
too much intent. It gave her too much
credit. But “met” made it all seem
mundane. People meet at a party or over
lunch. She hadn’t met her.
The drive this morning left plenty of time to think about
that day. The roads were empty, as they
often were this early, but so many of the bridges were up that it took forever
to get to the city. In the fog, she
couldn’t see what types of boats were crossing.
There were just patches of red and blue metallic paint that floated
through her line of vision. She sipped
her coffee thoughtlessly as she waited for the chain of color to end and the
metal arm to push through the haze, its flashing lights hitting the airborne
water molecules and revealing their movement.
The air was always moving, even if she wasn’t.
I like how "fog" acts as the connector in the stream-of-consciousness style towards the end. Very nice!
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