Sketch № 11: The Flickering Lamps
Last Tuesday — one day after Mrs. C, Roscoe, Violet, and I vowed to call on the citizens of Applewood to come together and save a gasping Café Confictura — the last broken streetlamp on the café’s Beech Street was repaired. It’s been flickering ever since my first moments here in Applewood, its heart, like so many others in town, ruptured by the mysterious earthquake that struck on April 1. Beech Street has been impassable, as shards of asphalt were driven up by the Quake. That’s what folks here call it — the Quake, capital Q, like it’s got a life of its own, this unwelcome, destructive guest who stopped in town for just a few moments but left an indelible scar.
Tuesday night, the streetlamp glowed once again, bursting into hazy brilliance at dusk like its neighboring lamps. Anyone who was nearby or passing on the freshly hardened concrete of the new sidewalk cheered, just as they would cheer again Wednesday at noon when the café’s section of Beech Street was officially open again to traffic. This patch of street, a rather long block, is shared by several businesses, including the Holy Cheeses delicatessen, In Greeting stationary and card shop, Judy’s Steakhouse, Blake Buston’s Realty, Applewood Arts Gallery (no, the “s” isn’t a typo there), and of course directly across the street from the café there’s Our Lord of the Ascension, which is Pastor Sweeney’s church.
Wednesday at 5:30 p.m., then, the time we’d all asked Applewoodians to gather at the café for a mega brainstorming session on how to breathe life back into Confictura, we were excited for a decent turnout. After all, however bad the rumors Nessie Fyne, Mrs. C’s archnemesis, had started about our supposed vandalizing of Sweeney’s church, however bad it looked when we came out of the church on our innocent visit and found cops and sirens awaiting us, “Sunny days make sunny ways,” as my old editor used to say. He probably still says it. I wouldn’t know; he fired me. But the point is, one uplifting moment has a tendency to inspire folks to be their best selves if only for a little while.
We weren’t entirely disappointed, either — by 5:45, just about all the people we’d personally invited had shown up. All seven members of the writing salon Roscoe leads were there, along with a bunch of Violet’s clients she helps as The Fastionista (a wardrobe consultant who builds style fast), Mrs. C’s other baristas, friends, loyal customers, and young Dr. Graham Teek. Three people even told me they came because they read about it in this blog, and if you three are reading now, thank you, both for coming last week and for reading, especially since I think you three make up the whole of my readership from Applewood.
But, as Mrs. C murmured to Roscoe, Violet, and me when the whole group had gathered in the front café room, “After forty years of Confictura doing business here, I would’ve thought more people would come out to help us.”
“Well,” said Roscoe, “we did only give them a couple days’ notice.”
Violet nibbled at the side of her nail and added in her French accent, “And Nessie has not stopped yammering with her lies. And they grow in size every time they appear, like annoying teenagers.”
Doc Graham had made his way over toward Violet and turned his moony eyes to her. Once or twice when he’s been around the café, he’s very sweetly declared his undying love for her, but every time he asks her out, she says something French and walks away. Then she smiles like a schoolgirl when she thinks no one’s looking.
The doc said, “One of my patients told me you four went into the church, took baseball bats to every glass surface, and graffitied the walls.”
“Great,” said Mrs. C. “Soon the story will be that we used all the incense and candles to try burning the whole place down.”
Meanwhile, while all these lies are swarming like locusts, no one’s talking about the real, troubling truth:
Why did the glass in the church just start cracking on its own that day, right in front of our eyes?
One member of Roscoe’s writing salon, Miguel, sat near us by himself at a small table, his chair pushed away from the table and his arms crossed. He quietly chewed a piece of gum, the sharp line of his jaw moving slowly. He said, “Her and Sweeney both been lying.”
Automatically, Roscoe corrected him: “‘She and Sweeney have both been lying.’ Remember, take out one of the nouns to see how the other sounds alone in the sentence if you’re not sure — if you take out ‘Sweeney,’ would you say, ‘Her has been lying’? No. You’d say, ‘She has been lying.’”
“Yeah, she has been,” said Miguel. With the Quake came a brain fog that settled over all members of the salon, and these young adults, mostly in their twenties like Miguel, who were brilliant grammarians and lovers of language now aren’t sure how to put a sentence together. “I heard her and . . .” He thought a moment, then started again: “I heard she and Sweeney have plans to shut this place down.”
“Plans that already have been put into motion,” Roscoe added. “We’ve asked you all here today to help us bring more customers back to Confictura. The rumors are killing the café’s business.”
More people were listening to us now. Portia, another member of the salon, spoke up: “You need to do a poll on social media or something. Find out what it’s gonna take to get customers back in here. Like, Free Coffee Day or something.”
“Yeah,” said Miguel. “Don’t think so much about what you need, but more what we need — what your customers need.”
He said it innocently enough, but Violet swiped aside her cool demeanor and pounced. “Mrs. Creaverton thinks of nothing else but the rest of this town. She loves all of the people and puts herself at the end of the line always.”
Mrs. C laid a calming hand on Violet’s shoulder. “Thank you, Vi, but I don’t think Miguel meant any insult.”
Miguel’s gum chewing had stopped with his stunned expression. “I didn’t,” he stammered. “Honest.”
Another voice, a little deeper, floated up from the group. “I think it needs to be the exact opposite,” said Clarke from another table. He was the most promising writer in Roscoe’s salon, almost the codirector of the bunch. He wears his Afro sculpted in a more retro, ’70s style, and he dresses in uber-trendy three-piece suits with gorgeous neckties.
“Meaning?” Portia asked him.
“It’s like when they fixed the last streetlight outside,” he said. “That thing was gonna flicker until it just totally died, unless people fixed it. It was on the construction workers to fix it. Same with the whole street out there. You let it stay cracked, it’s just gonna get worse.
Then suddenly this thing you took for granted all these years is gone.
I’ve heard the rumors about Mrs. C too,” he said. “People gossiping, and that turns into, ‘Yeah, that café isn’t so great after all, is it?’” Clarke stood up and thumped his fist against the tabletop. “Well, you know what? Yeah, this café is great. This street is great, that streetlamp is great, and Applewood is great, just the way it was.”
This garnered a smattering of supportive mutters and claps.
“It always has been,” Clarke continued. “And the way you know it’s been great is that things just ran relatively smooth.
“This café hosted Roscoe’s salon, where I was taught how to turn my writing from doodles in a notebook into a meaningful career. I was lost. This place and Mrs. C and Roscoe saved me. And, okay, right now we’re not feeling so hot. We’re in a slump. But if we lose this café, a place that’s always been there for all of us, we’re gonna really be hurting. We think we have it so bad now? We don’t know what bad is until we lose a cornerstone of our lives here.
“Shut up about ‘what can the café give us.’ It’s given,” he said. “Now it’s flickering. What’re we gonna do to help it? We need to get off our butts and give back, ’cause by saving the café, we help ourselves.”
All-out applause burst around the whole place. I clapped so hard my palms hurt.
That night, everyone who was in the meeting started working doubly hard in the community — every time they found someone buying into Nessie and Sweeney’s rumors, they erased the untruth and filled in with questions like “What’s your favorite thing about the café?” that got the people thinking about what life would be like if they didn’t have Confictura at all anymore . . . and it got them to admit the truth — that Mrs. C wasn’t some agent of the devil who would destroy the church, but that she was, in fact, responsible for keeping afloat one of the few things in town that was still good.
By two days ago, Saturday night, the café was hopping again. It was just about 9:00 p.m., the last of the sunset fading under twilight’s stars, and Mrs. C noticed, “It’s not cold anymore.”
Indeed, the café, which had incurred its own internal cold snap during the two weeks business had slowed to a trickle, was warm enough to open the windows again in the Riverview Room. “I wonder . . .” she said to Violet and me at the front counter. “Roscoe said last week that I am the café.” She looked around at the families having a late dessert and students studying and couples clinking mugs of lattes, and she said, “I don’t think that’s true. I think we are the café. I just run it.”
I felt like she’d hit on a bigger truth there, and I wanted to ponder her words more, but I’ve had to set that aside for now. The words were barely out of her mouth when the lights throughout the café flickered, pretty erratically. I asked, “Is that connected to the flickering streetlamp they fixed this week?”
Mrs. C said plainly, “No,” and she walked back to the Fireplace Room, waving for me and Violet to follow, which we did. This room has alcoves and a couple small closets — at least, I thought they were closets.
She watched one of the closed “closet” doors, and waited. And then it opened, on its own, the doorknob turning and everything.
I’m a person who looks for the rational explanation first. My mind was still hunting when Mrs. C turned to me and said, “It’s Mr. Creaverton. He’s here.”
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Clarissa J. Markiewicz is also 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.
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. ©2024 Clarissa J. Markiewicz. No portion of this or any related blog post may be used to train any AI application without explicit consent from the author.
