snippet, work in progress

ed. note: I'm not sure where, if anywhere, this is going. I happened upon some old writing describing the color of coffee, and stuff happened from there. I've oddly found that once I put something "out there" that more ideas often come to me. This is the first "snippet" I've published here. I hope to continue the story, once it settles and I find out where it's going. Enjoy the snippet.

The steam poured out of the paper cup full of burnt caramel-colored Sumatra coffee with a touch of half and half. He turned to his left, waved goodbye to an acquaintance sitting near the window whose name he couldn't recall, and walked out the door. The one wooden step outside had decayed so much from time and the elements that it sagged in the middle as he stepped on it. It would eventually break in a very dramatic scene involving hot coffee, a cat, a skateboarder, and a couple carrying two bottles of wine (one red, one white), but he would not be there to witness this, having already gone to Seattle.

The air outside the coffee shop was thick and tobacco scented. As he walked through the hot, sticky, Jersey-summer air, he wondered again why he was drinking coffee barely hotter than the air he was breathing.

He also wondered just how it was he ended up in New Jersey, when but a moment ago he was riding the Sound Transit bus 545 from Seattle to Redmond. It was a bit shocking when he reached into his pocket and found car keys, as in Seattle he did not own a car. But he was not in Seattle anymore. He was in New Jersey (or Jersey, if you're a native). And it was summer. And it was hot.

As he turned the car on, an NPR reporter spoke of a massive hurricane heading straight towards New Orleans. It was August 2005, and this hurricane would spark news stories for years. He had read a story about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in the Seattle PI not long ago, close to two years after the storm. This, however, was not Seattle 2007; it was New Jersey 2005, and he was not supposed to know this yet. He was not on his way to a job he dreaded at Microsoft, he was on his way to a store in a retail outlet complex, where he worked as a low-level manager, a job he hated.

His mind, still bridging the years, briefly wondered if it was worse to dread something, or to hate something. He didn't settle on an answer. Both seemed bad, yet he found both unavoidable (the jobs and the feelings about them). At Microsoft, he reasoned, they paid him well and didn't make him work weekends. He's not sure how he remembers this, as it hasn't happened yet, so he lightly dismisses it as his own personal fiction. Seattle 2007 was becoming a distant memory; Jersey 2005 was becoming the current reality (if you could call it current, even though part of him knew it was two years ago), the sticky, sweaty summer air driving that reality into his mind.