“Grief, Grief And Grief: An Unholy Trinity” © Richard Davis

 

Down in the World

For two decades Café Gemeinschaft had been a popular hangout with students, faculty, and administrators of Bindover College. Only a block off-campus, a five-minute walk from the campus library entrance on College Avenue, business at Café Gemeinschaft had hummed steadily six days a week from 7:00 a. m. to 11:00 p. m. The full menu of coffee and tea beverages, salads and sandwiches, cupcakes and pies had satisfied the palates of all patrons. Pedestrians, skateboarders, and cyclists all felt welcome, and anyone driving could always find a space in the ample parking lot.

Sadly, Café Gemeinschaft burned to the ground towards the end of a recent spring semester. Summer school sessions had been suspended due to COVID concerns, so no member of the Bindover College community noticed the absence of Café Gemeinschaft immediately, except for administrators who were obliged to find other venues for their lunch breaks, such as the more expensive Verdun Bistro a further block away.

Once classes resumed in the next fall term, the Bindover College community was confronted with a successor establishment named Café Gesellschaft (a growing chain founded somewhere on the West Coast), which had been built on the very site of what had been everyone’s favorite Café Gemeinschaft. While the structure housing Café Gesellschaft was larger than that of the former establishment, the parking lot was concomitantly smaller: barely a quarter of the number of parking spaces were available, and because these few spaces were usually filled, street parking (the parallel variety) was at least that much more difficult to come by. —and even though the Café Gesellschaft interior was larger than that of its predecessor, the interior was divided up in peculiar fashion. Counter service was no longer optional, but seating was available in the narrow booths arranged along the interior perimeter, with a few small tables interspersed within the ample floor space between the service and kitchen area and the row of alternating two- and four-seat booths on the perimeter.

Café Gesellschaft menu options proved limited, too. The only beverage item available was espresso, although served in single, double, or triple doses. Pumpkin pie and banana bread slices were advertised on a wall-mounted chalkboard but were only irregularly available. Alternatively, a pistachio-laced-and-encrusted bread was regularly served, but the pistachios doing the lacing and the encrusting were routinely flavorless, which to some tastes defeated most of the culinary intent. Wi-fi connectivity was second-to-none, but it took patrons at least two visits to discern that the building featured no windows at seat level, so prevailing weather and traffic conditions outside could not be reliably observed by sight. —and frankly, the espressos themselves were never exactly hot and could easily be deemed “watery” as far as espressos go.

The Bindover College clientele of Café Gesellschaft became distressed, disconsolate, desperate, despairing, and sad over succeeding semesters, despite the venue’s convenient location. The espresso service was never regularly augmented with any other beverage style, and the advertised pumpkin pie and banana bread slices never became routinely available (a cardboard and plaster granola concoction did finally materialize, with criminal regularity). All happy memory of the Café Gemeinschaft faded with each class’s graduation over the next four years.

Across the street and down the block from the suffering clientele of Café Gesellschaft early one afternoon, newly-hired Bindover College administrators Hearn Hotchkiss and Doris Moreau were dining at the Verdun Bistro. The dramatic ambiance of this establishment continued to generate a favorable buzz locally, both through the Bindover College community and in the surrounding business district and residential neighborhood.

The Verdun Bistro was one of those spots featuring moderately-pricey fare, served atmospherically with almost subluminal lighting suggestive of a poorly lit stage or of clandestine romance or of black-market intrigue or of a friendly espionage rendezvous or of trench dugout accommodations, while concealing from patrons just what they were dining on, and how much, since all orders were served on plates sized to the fashionably small servings. Diners also were obliged to appreciate the Verdun Bistro for the sophistication that comes to any restaurant featuring jangly live piano accompaniment to the piped-in muzak of plaintive Jim Croce ballads.

“Well, as long as the kitchen is well-lit,” Hearn whispered above the piano and the late Jim Croce balladeering. Hearn kept his chin propped up in case one of the kitchen doors swung open, he was eager to observe the kitchen lighting as he sipped from his glass of malbec while awaiting his order of coq au vin.

“I thought we’d get to go to rehab together,” Doris fretted. “If they don’t bring our soups and salads soon, I don’t think we’ll make it. I have to be back at work by two, remember.”

“At least we have our basket of bread,” Hearn replied, “the honey butter’s not bad.”

“—but the damned bread is doughy!” Doris complained. “I can’t stand doughy bread! I mean, doughy bread is doughy bread! Who’d even want to begin to imagine a doughy croissant? Yuck!”

Hearn’s left eyebrow lifted slightly as he spied a kitchen door swing open. The kitchen interior was ablaze in candlelight, and in the foreground he could plainly see two or three leg
amputations underway: apparently, kitchen staff were dutiful to the culinary psychology of Verdun circa 1917, which instantly led him to think that his chicken would at least be fresh. “Just curious,” Hearn spoke, “but what did you order again? The ‘Douaumont Surprise Quiche’ or the ‘Meuse Cassoulet’?”

 

Edward Burke remains a writer of fiction (noir humor, science satire, absurdism, typically) and verse (quality ever improving) and infrequent (and infrequently published) essays.

Richard Davis is Oddball Magazine’s newest contributing artist.