Sketch № 1: Café Open on Darkened Street
In the broken heart of Applewood, Connecticut, the café is bright, even at this late hour. The last reporter just left, their van chugging off, bits of the town’s torn-up main street spitting out from under its tires. It’s cold sitting out here, on a bench that’s cleaved right down the middle; yet somehow both sides still stand. But spring — real spring, not what we were supposed to get on March 19 — is coming. A ripe smell rises from matted leaves, fall’s leftovers thawing from winter’s frost.
The newsfolk’s coverage over the past week was threadbare and almost identical to one another: “earthquake . . . 7.2 . . . massive damage . . . unprecedented in this region.” The earthquake, though, seems to be the most normal thing that’s disrupted life here since last Monday, and the newsfolk prefer normal. I should know. I’m one of them. Well, I was. At some point, probably while sitting right here on this half-bench, I decided I wanted to tell not the story I’d been sent here to cover, but the stories none of the newsfolk were talking about — the abnormal stories. No one reported on what people who live here are calling the “rot.” No one reported on the brain fog. No one reported the accidents, the injuries that came even after the last tremor eased.
No one reported the unexplained deaths.
No one reported on the Café Confictura and how it seems to be the one building untouched by the destruction. Amid the newsfolk burning rubber in and out of there for their caffeine jolts between live shots, I spent the last week drifting around the many rooms of the place. For days, I nursed cups of coffee, and while others chased their normal story, I sat still. That’s when I started to hear notes of the abnormal. It was like dozens of radios on all at once, but tuned in midway, never catching the full track — notes from the songs of Applewood’s residents: ballads and lullabies, operas and hymns, carols and requiems of the lives shaken by the Quake.
I heard notes of secrets and deception, desires and longing, and what I can only describe as magic — supernatural encounters and maladies, rumors of mysticism behind the cracked glass doors of Our Lord of the Ascension’s sacristy, tales of the volunteers for Father Jack’s Table who awoke with the Quake and have not slept since.
Then there’s the most spellbinding magic of all: the magic of ordinary people. Light magic . . . and dark.
As a reporter I learned to trust my gut, and after spending a week here, my gut says there is unfinished business in Applewood. This isn’t a case of one flukey crisis, the terrible main event done with only the cleanup remaining. Somehow the Quake shook more than the ground. That’s how the people here refer to it: the Quake. You can hear the capital “Q” in their voices.
The online magazine I wrote for up in Boston, the same one that sent me down here a week ago to get the normal story, isn’t interested in the abnormal notes. This morning they wiped my name so clean from the staff page that it might squeak if you run a finger over its streak-free shine, though the fight with my ex-boss over the phone last night was a sight messier. I had principles, I said. I had journalistic integrity, I said. I had a contract, he said. I was in violation of it by refusing to go home and file my non-story. I guess I’m lucky I got off with just losing my job and not a lawsuit.
When I set out this morning to the Café Confictura to start interviewing people, I had every intention of making this blog a new start for myself.
One thing I didn’t bank on was that no one would talk to me.
And so I sat here, on this bench, wondering just what in the hell I was going to do next, until about fifteen minutes ago when a woman came out of the café and crossed the nighttime street toward me. I hadn’t seen her before, and I hadn’t seen her go in tonight.
She’s a puffed zeppola of a woman with a dollop of white hair topping a warm smile. With agility she stepped over the jagged asphalt shards of Beech Street that the Quake had pushed up, and she sat down on the other half of the bench.
“I’m Phillipa Creaverton,” she said brightly before I could ask. “And you’re . . . well, you’re looking for a way in, aren’t you?”
“Any suggestions how to do that?” I asked.
“Try the front door,” she said, getting up again and gesturing to the café. “Six a.m. sharp tomorrow.”
“They don’t open ’til seven.”
“They’ll open early for me. G’night.”
My first possible lead into the abnormal.
Spring is coming.
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This and any related blog posts are works of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. Any reference to living or dead public figures, entities, places, events, and the like, are of a fictional, opinioned, and/or parodic nature. No healthcare professionals have been consulted in writing this. Any advice given or inferred is anecdotal and used at your own risk. Consult your doctor in all healthcare matters.
Clarissa J. Markiewicz is the author of Christmas In Whimsy — a heartwarming, fun novel readers compare to Hallmark Christmas movies, and recipient of Readers’ Favorite 5-star Seal — and the genre-bending new-age mystery The Paramour Pawn.
