Whose Coffee Is It?
by
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They don't see me coming. I'm a surprise. Not invisible. Bypassed. But not in this shop drinking coffee from my monogrammed mug. There are hundreds of us. Customers. And, unlike me, most of them are not here every morning. Being overlooked is new to me. Until I was 70 it didn't happen; but now, eight years later, I know I have to get used to it. The inevitable must be faced or things get worse. A woman my age with bleached hair and thick make-up is grotesque —besides, I'm too tired for masks. The coffee shop is full of smells from Santa Domingo to the House Blend. The air conditioning works. Music plays. Everything but heavy metal and rap, so I don’t get blasted off my stool. The clerks are all in college or law school and they like their work. They will even split the O.J. and pour half in a thick glass with ice. I pay attention to details, and I listen to strangers: the arrangement of their words, their pauses, evasions and little movements. It's an international place. Spanish is in the air, but French, too, once in a while. Sometimes I learn more than I want to know from a man in love with his cell phone. Truth is slippery. I can only speculate, but I have time to do just that. What is acceptable here? What passes for normal? I'm not sure, but some people get too near the edge and have actually been barred. One man was cruel to the clerks; he called it “teasing” and he tried to get a political rise out of the regulars, but he was met with silence at every turn. After four months, he just stopped coming. He drove a fancy car and liked to gloat over the erosion of Democratic power after 9/ll. Maybe his wife got sick or he moved to Florida. Age brings change, sooner or later. Life brought it later to me. My husband and my best friend died in the same month. It's been a year, and the weather hasn't changed. It just rains more this summer, and sometimes the power fails in the late afternoon. Atlanta is a city of trees. Some fall.
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About the Book
I met June Seese in a class on writing fiction. As a teacher, one of my biggest kicks was that moment when the writers first read something they’d written. It was a nervous time—many writers shaking inside, for the first time showing their work to strangers, sympathetic, but nonetheless, strangers. June was remarkable. What has flowered since was already sturdy, strong distinct. She read with a confidence that moved beyond the personal, a faith outside herself in the certainty of her work. Here was a writer who had risen to that essential power where her work becomes necessary to her, a gift as sure and heedless as her pulse. She was right on track, and would move, beyond discouragement or criticism or even appreciation, into the strength, that difficult ease that’s the mark of a writer who will continue regardless, achieving an undeniable, unmistakable voice.
What makes a writer? Originality, a delighted care for language, a commitment to push words into new music and finally into pure emotion. June has these gifts—and her writing’s strengths—
toughness, speed, lyricism, observation acuity and, ultimately, a compassion that’s never unsteady,
never weak—make her the best kind of writer—impatient, hip, timely and transcending.
—Paul Evans, Editor, Southline Press
About the Author
Recipient of a 200l Yaddo Writers’ Fellowship, June Akers Seese is also the author of two novels published by Dalkey Archive Press: What Waiting Really Means, Is This What Other Women Feel Too?, plus a collection of short fiction, James Mason and the Walk-In Closet. Some Things are Better Left to Saxophones and A Nurse Can Go Anywhere and Collected Short Stories were published by iUniverse.
Her short stories have appeared in Witness, Carolina Quarterly, and South Carolina Review, and they are collected in three chapbooks funded by the Georgia Council for the Arts: Near Occasions of Sin, Claudia and a Long Line of Women, and My Affairs are in Order/All Those Men are Dead Now.
Mrs. Seese teaches “The Memoir: Reading It and Writing It” at Callanwolde Fine Arts Center in Atlanta, Georgia.