Fiction by Jessa Roberts
1st Place for College Fiction - 2019 Met AwardsIt began in a coffee shop“Hey Grey!” Joe yelled, sliding into the chair next to Greylynne, who frantically flipped the napkin she had been writing on over, “I wrote your number on someone’s cup!”
On the corner of hope and despair
Where steam twisted up
From mugs filled with leftover dreams
Set on tables carved out of nightmares
Grey gaped at her friend, “What?”
Joe beamed smugly, the day’s last rays of sunlight peeping through the shop's window running its fingers through her apricot colored hair sadly, “I wrote your number on his cup!” she repeated, flicking glowing strands out of her face.
“Who’s cup?” Grey tried again suspiciously.
Joe cradled her chin in her hands, “He gets a mocha, you get a mocha,” she giggled, hiding her face in her hands.
Obviously to Joe that meant they were soulmates. Or reincarnated lovers destined to find each other and fall in love. Grey rolled her eyes.
“Isn’t that abusing your power as a barista?” she asked wearily.
“Giving rude people decaf shots is abusing my power,” she smiled sweetly.
Grey sighed, “Good to know.”
“Okay, okay, okay,” her friend demanded, “look over there, in the corner.”
Grey let her gaze drift in the direction Joe had flicked her eyes conspiratorially.
A young man had tucked himself away in the darkest corner of the coffee shop. The hood of his crisp black hoodie pulled down over his eyes.
“His name’s Casper,” Joe twittered, “he comes in now and then. He is so cute!”
Grey watched him for a moment.
"Why didn’t you give him your number?”
Joe smirked, “He’s out of my league.”
The figure lifted his head, and Grey saw the flash of a large silver crucifix peaking out from his collar before she met his eyes. They were large and intense, deep set into his skull. Mournfully they watched her. He looked at once at home and lost. Grey dropped her eyes, needing to escape his look, and started folding her napkin nervously.
Joe, oblivious, pulled her phone out of her pocket and checked the time, “Kay, love you, my breaks over!”
She stood up, “Be careful going home. Text me when you get in!”
After Joe left Grey only stayed around for a couple more minutes before Casper’s sorrowful eyes chased her out. On her way to the door she passed the shop’s newspaper stands. Headlines screamed murder and flaunted barely censored pictures of local girls who had their throats slashed open. The gruesome killings had shocked Grey’s sleepy little town. Now fear hung in the cold air like a mist, clinging to your clothes and biting your exposed skin.
For the next week Joe became an overenthusiastic matchmaker, trying every sly and back handed way to get Casper and Grey to talk to each other.
Grey desperately avoided it. A fact that only inflamed Joe’s devilish scheming.
Wednesday the papers bled the story of another victim. A young girl found dead in a public restroom. Consistent with the previous tragedies, her throat had been mangled. Cause of death was blood loss.
Joe and Grey huddled together on Grey’s couch, trying to drown in re-runs of I Love Lucy. After a couple episodes Joe lifted her head from where it had been resting on her knees.
“I think Casper hates me.”
Grey snorted, trying to fight back a smile at her comically heartbroken tone.
“Why?”
Joe laid her head back down.
“I told him he looks like the actor that played Pennywise the Clown.”
Grey choked, “What?”
“The actor! He’s handsome in real life!”
Grey threw back her head and laughed.
Joe scowled at her, “I was trying to compliment him!”
“Oh Lord,” Grey gasped between laughs, “He must hate you now!” She smothered her face in her hands, giggling into her palms.
Joe pouted, obviously brokenhearted that all her matchmaking had gone to waste.
“He’s weird anyway.”
“Weirder than you?” Grey giggled under her breath, earning an evil look from her friend.
“He got into a fight or something the other day.”
Grey thought of those haunted eyes of his, “Really?”
Joe nodded forlornly, “His hands were all beat up, like he’d punched something. And his lip,” she paused, “it looked like he’d bit it. It was creepy.”
Grey patted her friend’s shoulder, “Well that’s what happens with bad boys, love,” she said consolingly.
“Greylynne?”
“Hmm?”
“Promise me you’ll be careful,” Joe looked up at her sadly, “you know, with all the girls being found"
“I promise, mom,” Grey leaned in and hugged her tightly.
No new headlines popped up for a while. But Grey noticed things were getting weirder and weirder around Joe’s work. Other young baristas started asking their male coworkers to walk them to their cars at night. Joe herself started to avoid later shifts.
“Whatever happened to Casper?” she once asked.
Joe clammed up, only commenting that he was “weird” when Grey pressed her.
The sun had finally stopped struggling against the turning seasons. After weakly shining during the day it succumbed helplessly to the ravenous dark. The dark drove everyone inside. The fear kept them there.
While waiting for Joe to go on break one day, Greylynne mindlessly began sketching a cross across the back of a napkin. It reminded her of Casper’s crucifix. For days afterward that crucifix had popped up in her poetry. She hadn’t thought about it in a while.
His displaced eyes, however, still haunted her dreams. Despite the hushed relief that had crept in after the absence of new murders, Grey could almost feel her poetic sensibility stretching taught, anticipating something big and evil was just beyond the quiet.
One night later her phone began buzzing frantically. Having nearly fallen asleep, Grey ignored it. It buzzed again. And again.
She sat up amidst the nest of blankets and grabbed her phone.
“Greylynne!” Joe’s mom yelled, “You tell her to come home this instant!”
“Who?” Grey drowsed.
“Josephine! Tell her to come home right now!”
Grey scrunched her nose, an inexplicably cold feeling was creeping up her limbs, “I haven’t seen her all day, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Silence on the other end.
“What’s going on?”
Nothing. Grey repeated herself, desperation creeping into her voice.
“No one knows where she is,” Joe’s mom whispered, “We can’t find her.”
Grey fell out of her bed, grabbing her car keys, offering hollow sounding reassurances as she started her car.
First she went to the café, which was closed. The parking lot was empty, aside from the swirling masses of dead leaves. The cold forced itself down her throat, making a nest in her lungs.
Little roads spidered out around the edges of Grey’s little town. Sometimes her and Joe would cruise down one of them, enjoying the mysterious twists and turns that lead them into gentle hollows or meadowlike clearings. Grey desperately grasped at the idea that Joe had decided to take one of them home. For the sake of being Joe. Adventurous. Stupid.
Grey drove frantically down the little paths of asphalt that happened to lead away from the café. Maybe Joe’s phone had died. Maybe she was just star gazing. Hopeless. She was hopeless.
The headlights of Grey’s car raced over the gravelly road like hounds on the hunt. They ran for miles. Silence. A tear ran down Grey’s cheek and a sinking pit formed in her gut. Wrong. Something was wrong.
The headlights bounded onto an indistinct lump in the middle of the road a ways ahead of her. Grey’s foot slipped from the gas pedal unconsciously, and her car slowed. The hounds of her headlights surrounded the lump of quivering flesh.
Casper lifted his head. Lost. Lost eyes blankly staring into the headlights. Blood slid loosely from his lips, dripping onto the asphalt. Dripping onto the delicate white skin gripped in his hands.
The next morning, she was a headline. They both were.
About the Author
Jessa Roberts is a Cerro Coso student. Being a barista is one of Roberts' passions; for the last two years she has had the opportunity to share what she loves with others. This profession is also a great source of inspiration for her. "I have heard somewhere that coffee shops are not supposed to have clocks," Roberts says, "because they are a place where time does not exist."
