Read Cafe Stories from Caffeinated Fiction Writers from Around the World!

Two girls sit in a downtown coffee shop called Sacred Grounds. Outside is rain, but the cafe is warm. They sit at a glass-topped table and talk, hands wrapped around foam-topped lattes. One is fair-skinned, blue-eyed, her blonde hair tied in a pony tail. She is dressed in black stirrup pants, red-and-green argyle sweater over a white turtleneck, calfskin tassel loafers. Her name is Courtney, or maybe Missy or Lauren, and she lives in a fourteen-room house with 150 feet of lake frontage. She takes precise sips from her cream-colored mug. Between sips she talks animatedly to her friend, a larger dark-haired girl in jeans and a handknit sweater of medium blue and rose and yellow in a Southwestern pattern. A $300 Dooney & Bourke purse hangs from the back of her chair. Their talk is of school activities and friends. So, like, the juniors throw a party for the seniors and they, like, take a few kegs up the hill and like party all afternoon, says the blonde. The dark one nods and blows gently across the top of her cup. How funnnn, she says. Yeah, the blonde says. The dark one nods again. Ummmmmm, she says. Pony tails eyes open wider. She leans forward. Deb is, like, having this party at her place Friday night. Judy and Teri and, like, everyone is going to be there. Her parents are going to be over on the coast. The dark one looks up from her latte. She smiles. How funnnn, she says. They talk another twenty minutes. Boys, classes, parties. How boring school is. How hard it is to find cute guys who are nice. Dances. Shopping. How funnnn. Graduation, college, marriage, kids. Ummmmmm. Dark hair says I gotta pee. She gets up and walks away. Pony tail stares out the window. At the heavy rain, the leaden sky. Her face darkens. What is it she sees? MayÕs prom she will not attend? Losing her virginity a month later to a boy she will never see again? Her sorority house at Pepperdine? Or is it the man she will marry whose face she stares at? Humming to himself as he fires bullets into the heads of their two young daughters, then moves the black revolverÕs muzzle to his own temple twelve years from now?