The Pour

She pours me coffee. The cup is small; the carafe, quite tall. She also is quite small, and the counter's tall too. So to pour me coffee, she has to grapple with the carafe with both hands, at shoulder height, arms fully extended, reaching out toward me and my tiny cup. The carafe is full enough that the coffee starts pouring before the spout is anywhere near the rim of the cup, so to get this done without making a huge mess, she has to feel how much coffee's in the carafe, comparing this feeling to all her previous kinetic experiences with it, and thereby determine exactly where in space to position the spout so that when the joe starts to flow, she's got it close enough to the center of the cup so that it doesn't pour down the near side and up out the back onto this page and my shirt, yet far enough away from the center so the lateral momentum of the coffee stream leaving the spout doesn't overshoot the back rim of the cup and make the same mess more directly.

She gets it right. My spirits rise from the dregs, to half-empty, to half-full, and onward to the top, when it hits me: she has no idea what she's gotten herself into, hasn't taken into consideration the fact that she has to perform the exit maneuver with equal or greater precision, has to extract the spout from the cup's airspace, might do this before the coffee in the carafe levels out enough to stop pouring, sending it all over the place again; or she might, to avoid that, accidentally bring the spout too high, so the final drops will fall too far, move too fast, much too fast when they hit the surface of the cup, and all the effort and delicate execution will be undone by a catastrophic final splash.

Ah, but she saw this coming, saw the problem and solved it at the outset — before I even knew it existed — and as I marvel at her adroitness, the precision with which she outplayed me, she pauses for a moment to cast a smile. The smile a touch too quick to be merely sweet, a hint of fire in there too, daring me to drink up this cup too and make her do it all over again.

    "Sweet," she says.
    
    "Thanks." I'm no match.

Only then does it hit me: she's Australian.

All of This is True

“All of this is true” was written neatly in black dry-erase marker on the glass of the sliding door. Beyond it, the balcony, the railing, the street, and the big corner gas station with the floodlights that never went off (much to my irritation). Assorted traffic passing at appropriate speeds, low buildings across the street, a big chunk of sky — an urban tableau streaming in through the glass. Every glance out that aperture made a frame for the time-lapse video of my memory of this place. And every frame was pre-captioned: “All of this is true.”

It was a reminder. I was in the habit, in those angry days too, of peering out over the railing to watch some neglected, overfed body sashay down the block to my astonished internal chorus: “How does one live like that? / Please let me never know.” Or, in the middle of the night, moonlighting as an insomniac and blaming it on the blazing bulbs across the street: “How can they be so cruel / What is wrong with the world?”

At night, the words cast their shapes in the light onto the backside of the pale curtains. But vibrations — whether from the unmuffled motorbikes at the biker bar next to the gas station, or subtler forces — might alter the light’s refraction through the glass, projecting new messages onto the cloth.

“Things could be different, but they’re not,” it said once, flickering. “Accept it, and go from there.”