Imagine the Swan

an original story

Christmas Lights Bokeh Effect by thr3 eyes. Creative Commons 1.0 Public Domain Dedication.

Down the familiar highway to the familiar exit, past the newly built apartment complex and the pagodas and windmills and castle spires of the family fun center. He attended birthday parties there, distant memories, conical hats and pizza and white layer cakes coated in icing, to be followed by miniature golf and go-karts. When parties centered on a game, an activity, something more organized, more planned than sitting on a couch and drinking, as at all today’s parties.

In the age of Bluetooth audio he can avoid the once unavoidable profusion of Christmas music on the radio.

He stops at the red light and turns his head to look down a street that once led to a friend’s house. That cul-de-sac appears to his mind’s eye, in summer sunlight. Then blankets and pillows and a sleeping bag arranged in front of a big black box of television, the screen glowing with pixelated graphics, wires leading from the console to the controllers in their hands.

1:37. What’s the old rule of thumb? Don’t drink coffee after 2:00, or it will keep you up at night. He has twenty-three minutes and could use some chemical assistance in getting through the afternoon and the evening back home, Home for the Holidays, through the awkward small talk with relatives’ new girlfriends or boyfriends, the avoidance of sensitive political topics and the arguments which will ensue despite this avoidance, the inevitable questions about the direction or his life or lack thereof, the aunts’ and uncles’ recitations of his younger cousins’ academic or career accomplishments, and the inner sense of inner stagnation resulting from performing the same activities in the same place with the same people for yet another year.

While searching for a parking spot he recalls the shopping center’s former tenants, the Mongolian barbecue, the Blockbuster and the RadioShack. He tries to remember what formerly occupied the space now housing the coffee shop. Was it a Diedrich Coffee? Are there any Diedrich Coffees anymore? Some other company bought them out, he remembers. He takes the cellphone out of his pocket and sees that mom and dad want to know when he will arrive.

Season’s Eatings! reads an illustrated sign on the door.

Try our

 Christmas Tree Cookie

Gingerbread Loaf

Peppermint Cake Pop

He gets in line. Paul McCartney is singing “Wonderful Christmastime” over the store speakers. He is behind six people. A presumably high school or college-aged girl is sitting alone, a thick textbook open on the table in front of her, a pen and notebook in her hand.

They look so young nowadays, he thinks, younger than we did at that age. Or do they? Perhaps a quick skim of the old senior yearbook would show faces too young for the threshold of adulthood. It’s probably still there on the bookshelf in the family room, next to the cookbooks and the World Atlas.

He looks back at the table and the objects on it seem like a little still life. Textbook, notebook, cellphone, coffee cup, water cup, receipt. At this moment he has a true appreciation for the earnestness, for the sheer studiousness of the young girl taking her notes on a book that he can now see is about organic chemistry.

An acoustic cover of “Last Christmas” sung by a female singer whose voice he does not recognize. A customer several spaces ahead of him in line clarifies that she wants a cappuccino, not a Frappuccino, hot rather than iced, and with two percent milk.

His eyes float up to the menu above the counter. They’ve already gotten rid of the Pumpkin Spice Latte. Needed to make room for the Winter Wonderland White Chocolate Peppermint Mocha Frappuccino, the Roasted Chestnut Caramel Macchiato and the Eggnog Latte.

Hot Tea Selections:

English Breakfast Blend

Earl Gray

Oolong

Chai Spice

There are now two people in front of him. He looks back to see a half-dozen people in line behind him. A girl, no, a woman grabs her coffee from the counter and turns around to reveal a face, yes, a face from the yearbook, a face he has not seen in more than a decade. He is pulled, vertiginously, back through his twenties and the death of his teens to adolescence and its piercing, intoxicating feelings as he sees, not six paces from him, the crystallized object of his infatuation.

She has tired eyes. Two children, one almost a newborn and the other about two, are sitting in the black plastic stroller that she is pushing towards him. Her face is not made up. She is and is not who she was.

Nonetheless he can feel the blood flow to his blushing face and hopes, as he hoped then, that she does not notice, that she does not see him at all. He looks away as he looked away.

Back to an earlier disposition, an earlier state of being, to the first true discovery of beauty and to an unrequited crush kept up with something like devotion, to when he would discover a song and play it over and over and over and over, when music hit with joy and sorrow at the same time and got past defenses. Ah, glory in the flower. Budding, blooming, blossoming, flourishing. Growth. And now, for a brief moment, a long-dead adolescent lives again.

But he is in line and she is leaving. It is his turn and he orders a medium hot Americano with two percent milk. A tall man holds the door open for her and her stroller.

What would he have said? he asks himself.

Several minutes later his coffee appears on the counter. “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” As he picks up the cup his eyes notice the cursive word written in black Sharpie. Amen. Yes, he thinks, amen to all of it, to the gains and to the losses. Amen.

No, not Amen, Amer, short for Americano, secular, impersonal, rational. But, nonetheless, Amen.

He walks out to his car and drives away.

---

Author’s Note: A happy holiday season to all. I hope to have a little consumerist Christmas gift for my readers — a look at the Pokémon phenomenon in America in the late nineties — under the tree, so to speak, by next Wednesday. But for now I have a melancholy Christmas story, the gravesite of several literary darlings.

This story, which I suppose developed out of various daydreams over the past fifteen years or so, has stuck with me for a long time before I finally decided to write it this December. And then, in a moment of perfect synchronicity, the ending happened to me in real life while I was in the process of writing the story. A few days ago I went to a cafe and ordered an Americano to go and read the writing on the cup as ‘amen’ before realizing that it was actually the abbreviation ‘Amer.’ So I had to put it in the story.

The title, if anyone is curious, comes from a fairly obscure Zombies song that seemed to fit the story and its mood.