Morgan Schneebeli
Johnson County Library is pleased to announce that Morgan Schneebeli has won our writing contest on the theme The Reluctant I with her short story "An Occurrence at the Cafe."
Morgan Schneebeli teaches and writes in the Kansas City area. She holds an English MA from Emporia State University where she received the 2022 Wild Outstanding Graduate Essay Award. Recently, one of her poems was selected for Johnson County Library's 2024 Art and Poetry Walk. This fall, she will be entering the Creative Writing and Media Studies MFA program at the University of Missouri - Kansas City. In her spare time, she enjoys reading, watching classic movies, dreaming up stories on nature walks, and loitering around art museums. Website: morganschneebeli.wordpress.com
An Occurrence at the Café
This guy walks into the coffee shop. He’s wearing a blue baseball cap, but it’s not the right blue; it’s not Royals blue. It might be Dodger blue. That part doesn’t really matter, though.
Anyway, he comes in and starts reeling off his drink order. It’s only one drink, but it’s got enough modifications to give every barista there an instant migraine. He looks like the kind of guy who would order an iced decaf Americano, maybe a cold brew if he’s feeling adventurous. Instead, he orders a sugary latte. The barista manning the register has dyed silver locks, but they appear to go grey by the time she gets all the customizations straight. When she asks for his name, he politely declines. He pays cash, then dumps his change into the tip jar. An itemized sticker spits out of the machine, curling like a cartoon scroll. There’s no way it will fit on the cup. Miraculously, it does. But that part’s not important either, not really.
The part that is important is what happens next. Blue Baseball Cap picks up his drink at the hand-off counter, then goes back to the register. He orders another latte; it sounds identical, all the way down to the extra nutmeg and light whip. He sips the first latte while he waits, oblivious to the fact that several sets of eyes are surveilling him, anticipating his next move. He’s probably bringing the second latte to a wife or girlfriend waiting in the car, probably just forgot to order two the first go-around. It happens. Candidly, it seems a stretch that two people would want the same weirdly specific latte, but then, maybe they’re that loved-up couple who do everything conjointly, from the way they order their steak to Soul Cycling on Thursday nights.
Fast forward, and he’s picking up his second drink. He’s armed with a cup in each hand now. He doesn’t walk toward the door, though. No, he calmly strolls back to the register and orders a third drink. It’s the same complicated latte as the first two. The barista looks a bit shell-shocked, but she soldiers on, donning a service smile as she faithfully executes her duties. She fires off the total, and Blue Baseball Cap capitulates, setting down one of his lattes so he can pull out his wallet.
The merry-go-round ends here—that’s what everybody’s thinking. After all, the guy’s only got two hands. But no, he plays his ace and asks for a drink carrier. The three uniform cups go into the trenches, leaving one unoccupied slot. You can predict his next maneuver. The only difference is that, this time, he has to file in line behind a gaggle of unsuspecting highschoolers.
And so, the senseless cycle continues. He’s halfway into his second drink carrier before people start leaving. Even a few of the regulars. They exit quickly but quietly, like it’s some sort of covert emergency drill, but their tight expressions signal their unease. By the time he begins on his third drink carrier, customers—or guests—are hightailing it out of the place like Armageddon is about to go down any minute. They don’t want to acknowledge what’s happening. They don’t want their kids to see. Because it doesn’t make any sense.
Blue Baseball Cap carries on with his recurring agenda. He's a postmodern Sisyphus, that dude from Greek mythology who rolled the same boulder up the same hill every day for eternity. It was supposedly a punishment for providing poor hospitality—specifically, bumping off a guest or two. (The barista at the hot bar stares daggers at Blue Baseball Cap; she probably wouldn’t mind bumping off a certain guest either.) In contrast to the Myth of Sisyphus, however, there is an eventual end: the skipped record stops repeating after the seventeenth drink. It’s an odd number to close out the cycle. Literally. Moreso, because there’s a latte left over after all four of the carriers are loaded, an unsatisfying remainder to a long-division problem. It takes a few trips for him to complete the withdrawal, but soon, the siege is over.
Maybe the whole situation was a test, some sort of frontal attack on the established norms of civil society. Maybe it was a social experiment. Maybe the guy had his toes run over by an off-duty barista once or maybe he simply ran out of funds to keep his one-track coffee order on repeat. Maybe there is no explanation. Whatever the case, it revealed something about each of us in the café that day.
I was one of the few who stayed, but it also stayed with me. Even now. Putting it down on paper helps, like that custom of attaching a message to the string of a balloon, then letting go. However, writing it down also invites meaning. Transcription demands order and reason. But there was no apparent rhyme or reason. It was just one of a thousand inexplicable episodes that occur every day—except it was more than that. It was an assault on the ordinary. They say motiveless crimes are the most likely to remain unsolved, and this noncriminal happenstance is probably no different.
Every now and then, the urge comes. Like an out-of-body experience, my brain starts to run through an order that’s drilled into my auditory memory: medium cookie butter oat milk latte; half caff; dash of cream; add white chocolate mocha sauce, two pumps hazelnut syrup, one pump sugar-free vanilla, and one-third pump lavender; light foam, salted caramel drizzle; substitute pistachio brittle topping for cookie crunch topping; dusting of cinnamon; extra nutmeg; light whip.
I don’t visit that coffee shop anymore—not the café anyhow. Even so, an impulse to circle back around often taunts me at the drive-through window. It taunts me almost as much as the ubiquity of baseball caps in a very particular shade of blue.