Deborah Levine-Donnerstein Season's Mystery

Season’s Mystery

My heart is not a season, although, it glimmers in reflective lights of winter’s sun on crystal snow.

When it simmers within the heat of mid-spring through summer sails, I conceal my heart among fragrant lake flora on silky waters of the deepest nights.

In darkening days of cooler-cloudy evenings, as brighter leaves dance to breezy fall, you reawaken me, and I become your autumn heart.

Deborah Levine-Donnerstein

Deborah Levine-Donnerstein’s work has appeared in Santa Barbara Anthology (Community of Voices), Curiouser and Curiouser, and others. Retired from the faculties of the University of California and University of Arizona, she began writing more fiction and poetry in Asheville, North Carolina.

Perfect Time for Morning Coffee

Buddy slid into his usual booth in Joe’s and took refuge in the golden morning light. Fat cardinals chirped in the maples that shaded Strawberry Street, their scarlet invisible among the flame red of the turning leaves. The mahogany brown paneling surrounding him in Joe's was rich and warm. His egg yolks were butterscotch, the hot sauce saffron. His coffee was black. The Irish whiskey was the color of an eagle's eye. He tasted chicken in the yard-fresh eggs and the chili sauce burned his tongue. The grain and nut and bitter of the coffee prepared him for the first sip of perfect peaty, malty, fiery whiskey. All of which soothed the spirit, opened the sinuses and pried Buddy’s eyes open for the day. As usual, he was Joe’s first customer. As usual, the only one.

In here he wasn’t Mister Famous Writer, he was just the guy who lived across the street and didn’t cook. His manuscript was now exactly one week overdue to his agent. But on such a perfect morning, how could he work? Buddy sighed. It was the perfect morning. There would never be a better one. There would never, ever be a more perfect morning than this one.

He raised the perfectly clear glass and toasted the perfect morning. Holding the whiskey to his eye he admired its surface. A beam of sunlight caught one edge of the glass and sprayed a rainbow of light into Buddy’s eye: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. Roy G. Biv. His favorite mnemonic. He knew others. HOMES, for the Great Lakes. ABO for blood types. The one for resistor codes which was – and always had been – offensive to women.

And could there be a more perfect woman than the one still in his bed. Allison. Auburn hair everywhere Allison. Pink cheek Allison. Gray eyed Allison. No, there couldn’t be. Buddy lifted his glass again and took a sip and saluted Allison.

She’d packed up her car the night before. He could see it through the open door of Joe’s, parked right across the street, facing north, where she would be

heading soon. It was perfectly red, sun glinting off the chrome door handles in perfect six-pointed stars. Time for her to be off to Mount Holyoke and her waiting dissertation director. Allison had been good company. But this was the perfect day for her to leave.

Savannah came by with refills of coffee and Irish. Buddy thought he was some percentage Irish. A large percentage English, of course. His mother claimed he was one thirty-second Monacan. African blood, too, like almost every native son. But really, his family had been in Virginia so long he had no idea how much of anything he was.

He was universal. He was everyman and everywoman. It was the source of his creative power. All those elements churning away inside his genes like molten rock beneath the earth’s crust. Kilauea’s lava spilling into the sea to form new land. Only in his case, his latest novel. The one still in manuscript on the flash drive in his shirt pocket. The one five days overdue.

Buddy sipped Irish and breathed out through his nose, savoring the alcoholic burn at the back of his throat. His eyes teared. He smelled oak in his nostrils. He tasted sweetness on the sides of his tongue.

Yes, there was the manuscript. But it could wait. Words could not be dragged out of bed and set to work barefoot in the cold morning air. Even if the morning air wasn’t exactly cold. Words had to be coaxed out into the sunlight, bribed with coffee and whiskey.

And here came the perfect Allison. She stood in the doorway, hesitating. They’d spent a delightful month in each other’s company. Easy company. And now she had to go back to her life. Buddy was grateful for the time they’d spent together. He felt a perfect balance of regret and relief.

He smiled and waved at her to join him. From the bar, Savannah said, “C’mon in honey and have something to eat afore you take off.”

Allison joined him, her sneakered feet making no sound on the polished oak planks. She slid into the booth next to him and took his coffee cup and his glass of

Irish. She poured the whiskey into the coffee and downed both together. Her peachperfect cheeks flamed red and she slammed the cup down on the table. “Whoo!”

Buddy looked over at the bar. Joe nodded and poured another glass of amber whiskey. Savannah put it on her cork-bottomed tray with a second cup and a carafe of coffee. They formed a perfectly balanced triangle.

Savannah’s hips were broad and the tray swayed slightly from side to side as she walked across the room towards them. Allison, whose hips were nowhere near that broad, smiled tolerantly. Anything that had gone on between Buddy and Savannah ended the moment Savannah took an interest in Joe. Everyone knew that. Allison knew because Savannah told her when asked. No guilty secrets in Joe’s place. As she placed the coffee and Irish on the table in front of them, Savannah said to Allison, “Can I bring ya something to eat? Y’oughta ta have something on your stomach if Officer Tim pulls you over.”

There was no Officer Tim. Rather, every Virginia State Trooper who cruised the interstate between Richmond and the District was Officer Tim. And every Officer Tim knew that Allison drove her little red Mazda with the Massachusetts license plates very, very fast. She had a glove box full of warnings written by Officer Tim.

Allison shook her perfect auburn hair. “No time. I’ve got to get on the road.” She looked sideways at Buddy. “Besides,” she said, grinning slyly, “I already ate this morning.” She poured creamer into her coffee cup and made a grab for Buddy’s Irish. He slid it out of her reach.

“She don’t mean that,” Buddy said, smiling. Allison drank her coffee in one long gulp and stood to go. She kissed the perfectly round bald spot on the crown of his head and said, “Bye, Buddy. Thanks for everything.”

“Ya come back,” Joe called out, “Ya family now.” Buddy watched her walk out of Joe’s and out of his life. Like all the rest before. Her ass, too, was perfect. Her last lingering laugh was loud and brassy. Buddy, Joe and Savannah echoed it.

Silence fell in Joe’s except for the Budweiser clock over the bar ticking time. Buddy sat unmoving in the booth as his coffee cooled. No thought disturbed his perfect peace as he basked in one perfect moment after another. The thin second hand on the clock ticked off increments of time as now became then. It was easy to believe that time came in quantum units, that he floated untethered in quantum spacetime. Savannah cleared his table, leaving the cooling coffee and the half-full glass of whiskey.

Slowly, slowly, the shaft of golden morning light that streamed through the open door crept away from Buddy. Slowly, its golden yellow paled.

He watched the morning’s perfection dissolve. At what instant was the morning perfect and then not perfect? Was it possible to put the two instants together, like the two palms of his hands, compare them, understand how perfection dissolved? To actually see perfection dissolve? Buddy ran a finger around the bald spot on his scalp. She was right. He really was becoming an intolerable old fart.

As the clock’s hour hand climbed from 9 towards 10 the moving beam lit up the brass foot rail at the bottom of the bar. The light twisted in a way that irritated Buddy’s eye. Joe’s cigarette smoke curled through the air, though Virginia law outlawed smoking in restaurants. Buddy was dragged into the flow of time as the blue smoke curled up from Joe’s cigarette to the tin ceiling tiles. The stink of burnt tobacco overwhelmed the odor of the oiled wood. The manuscript on his flash drive insisted. Still, there was coffee in his cup and Irish in his glass. His ass had mass and inertia.

Laborers in groups of two or more filtered in and sat and ordered breakfast beers. Young and old, white and black and brown, they all wore the uniform: old baseball caps the color of grease, abused work boots, saggy-butt jeans and frayed zipup hoodies over logo tee shirts. Joe turned on the flat screen TV over the bar and ESPN exploded in flashing primary colors.

Wearing bespoke suits, two ex-professional football players and an ex-play-byplay sportscaster dissected recent college football games and predicted the outcomes

of future ones. Great gig for has-beens. Buddy admired the suits. The tailoring was perfect.

Yanel the tiler over there at the bar worked hard at a useful job. He deserved a bespoke suit. More than Buddy, come to think of it, though he had one in his closet for the media events his agent arranged. Like the one tomorrow in Atlanta.

Has-been Number One told the world that Richmond defeated Albany 23-17 in overtime last night. Buddy’s alma mater. Has-been Number Two offered the opinion that if the Spiders’ defensive line, especially Number 92, hadn’t been so porous the game would have been a rout instead of a close thing. The Spiders were a force to be reckoned with this season. Except for their defensive line, apparently.

Buddy frowned and sipped his Irish. Maybe Number 92 had been playing hurt, unwilling to admit diminished ability. Maybe Number 92’s adversary on the offensive line was a talent going to the NFL. Maybe Number 92’s girlfriend had announced she was pregnant. Buddy raised his glass to poor Number 92, who was in for a rough week. Late rising VCU students started arriving and the smell of hot grease from the kitchen filled the air. The kids from the nearby dance department didn’t eat, of course, but they downed plenty of coffee. A fine mist of oil mixed with the chaos of TV light. Savannah rushed here and there servicing the tables and booths.

Waving a greeting to Buddy, Carmen and her mother Teresa came in for their morning coffee and donuts. They owned the flower shop across the street and lived above it. They were his neighbors. Buddy could see a bit of the front of their shop through the open door, not much detail but bright splashes of reds and bright whites against perfect deep green leaves. Carmen’s everyday black dress, widow’s weeds, set off the brightness of their flowers.

Her husband Jose died in Iraq when an IED blew up the Humvee he was driving. Buddy had met him a few times. Nice kid. His death had elevated him to local hero, though he’d spent three years in the Army not once having done anything heroic. It happened on a dirt road leading into Baghdad. Neither he nor the two officers he was driving saw a thing. One moment they were alive, minds full of

thoughts and feelings, eyes and noses full of grit. The next moment they were seared meat commingled with burning steel. Jose’s senses hadn’t even had time to transmit what was happening before his brains were splashed into the blast furnace that his vehicle became.

Jose’s abrupt transition from someone to nothing disturbed Buddy somewhere beyond thought.

His remains were delivered in a sealed coffin to Dover Air Force Base by a C130 full of other dead heroes. All nearby veterans’ cemeteries being full, the Commonwealth buried Jose in the Virginia Veterans Cemetery at Amelia, about an hour west of Richmond.

Carmen once told him she knew that Jose’s soul had been caught by Jesus at his moment of death and carried to heaven for eternal life. Perhaps it was his spirit, perfected after the death of his mortal self, that brightened her smile. But it was Jose’s life insurance and VA survivor benefits that paid her shop’s expenses.

As usual, she and her mother sat at a table next to the window so they could watch and see if anyone entered their shop. When someone did, Carmen would jump up, gulp down her coffee and rush out and cross Strawberry Street wiping white sugar powder from her hands and dress. Always white sugar powder from the one donut she allowed herself. The white powder always stained her black dress.

He sympathized. He really did. Unlike Jose, blasted across the divide, Pop died slowly. From cancer. Living each second of the way. Until the pills for the pain put him to sleep. That and his best friend Jim Beam. His sisters regularly smuggled ol’ Jim into Pop’s room in the hospice and took away the empties for recycling. Then the moment when his breath just stopped. Just. Stopped. With the family witnessing, necks craning this way and that for a glimpse of Pop’s spirit rising towards heaven. And yes, Aunt Eliza testified at the funeral that she saw Pop’s soul fly up to Jesus. Lot of perfecting needed to be done to Pop’s soul on the way to Jesus. But they all knew Aunt Eliza could handle that for Pop.

It was time for Buddy to leave. Time to go to work. Time. Always time.

He waved to Joe and Savannah at the bar and walked out. His manuscript needed work. Needed a complete rewrite of chapter six, really, to make the whole thing perfect. Because perfect was what he worked so hard to create. And chapter six, well, really --. Chapter six was the heart of the matter. It hurt him to think how much work it needed. A complete rewrite, not even a revision. An edit, a polish -- a revision even -- he could pull off in an afternoon. An afternoon and an evening. Or two days. No more than two days.

But a complete rewrite. Starting after, “Oma stood in the doorway as Junior’s Jeep sped away down her dirt road,” and ending with, “Sister Mary Baptista brushed the black pleats of her habit smooth and settled herself on the narrow confessional stool.”

Buddy knew how Junior’s wife felt as she lay dying in the cancer center. He knew what Sister Mary Baptista feared and why she hid from it within the folds of her habit. He knew what Oma, herself so close to death, chose to forget as she turned away to the TV playing in her bedroom. Each dealt with it in her own way.

It wasn’t as simple as death. Death was on this side of the divide. Although ‘divide’ implied a comparable something non-thing. Believers like Carmen, like Aunt Eliza, had words: heaven, hell, purgatory, lots of those kinds of words. But there were extended narratives connected to each of them and that meant time and that was no good at all. Plus they were reflections of what’s on this side of the divide.

The other imperfect words were merely self-negations: nonexistence was nonexistence; afterlife was after-life, nothingness was no-thingness. Janus-faced timeless was time-less. His favorite almost-perfect word, annihilation, was Latin for—more or less--‘becoming no-thing,’ a double negation. He’d already thrown a buzzing cloud of these almost-adequate words at not-it and they wouldn’t do. The best the French Existentialists could do was point towards not-it with buzzing word clouds of their own and then go out for a cigarette.

The problem was, the perfect word didn’t exist. Buddy imagined not-it as the other side of a one-dimensional strip of paper. Impossible to imagine an other side of

a one-dimensional object. Words cannot exist for non-things that cannot be known. Yet deep in the ticking clocks of their cells, all living things knew. How they knew was a mystery, a one-dimensional mystery. If there was knowing, there must be words. But there are no perfect words, is no perfect word. Buddy knew. He’d been searching for a long time and chapter six still wasn’t finished. A single word could stop a project cold.

Time was running out. He’d promised his agent the completed manuscript by the Atlanta reading. Tomorrow. Tick tock, tick tock. Buddy stood on the root-cracked, sap-stained sidewalk in front of Joe’s. He stared up at the empty window of his bedroom office across the street.

So Buddy decided: Okay, if there wasn’t a word for ‘the other side’ then he’d make one up. Name not-it Jose. Or Pop. Or Jesus, even. No, there were too many stories attached to names like that.

Tock. He’d name not-it Tock. Yes, that sounded right. Junior’s wife welcomed Tock as release from her body’s fight against the cancer. Sister Mary Baptista, her fragile faith overwhelmed by Doubt, lived in dread that Tock was all there was after Death. Oma retreated from Tock into willed dementia. Tock.

A breeze kicked up, blowing dead leaves off the maple trees. They swirled and fluttered down on him, brick red, yellow and brown. They fell onto Strawberry Street and traffic rolled over them, crushing them to fine dust.

Peter Alterman

Peter Alterman writes literary fiction, popular fiction, science fiction and literary criticism. Publications have appeared in New Dimensions Science Fiction 9, Twilight Zone Magazine, Gallery, and others. He is a member of The Writer's Center in Bethesda, Maryland.