The Grind of Universal Peace
On any planet, there’s always something brewing
So it’s just me and him on this spaceship but to be accurate it’s HIS spaceship because it was my people who boarded it but there’s no one left but me from my side and him from his at the conclusion of an epic conflict historians will one day call The Last Battle
So it’s just me and him on this spaceship and I call him “him” because I assume that as an aggressor he’s the male of his species just as the males are the aggressors of mine and also the fact he hasn’t tried to have sex with me nor I with him despite the extended absence of compatible sexual partners so it’s an educated guess on my part
So it’s just me and him on this spaceship and as the only ones remaining from our respective armed forces we have the authority albeit by default to call an end to hostilities and I’m all for it because I no longer know what the hell we’ve been fighting about because after all my grandfather and his grandfather fought this war for so long it was no longer called a war anymore it was just everyday life just the way things are and besides I’m so so tired
So it’s just me and him on this spaceship and we write up a peace treaty as best we can since he and I are in the infantry not in the treaty-drafting department and though we don’t settle any outstanding disagreements we do promise to leave each other alone and if necessary fight united against any common enemies which are several
So it’s just me and him on this spaceship and after we write and sign the treaty and we shake hands not really hands but an appendage I assume is the equivalent of a human hand he says let’s go somewhere appropriate to celebrate and I follow him to this lower-level area stepping over the corpses of the men I fought with side-by-side and what’s left of my new ally’s former comrades and we enter an area that looks like the nicest Starbucks I’ve ever seen and he says he knows how to work the espresso machine because he was a barista before he was drafted into the army and he asks what I want and I say a latte I’d love a latte because all I’ve had since I was drafted into the army was instant that’s worse than Sanka and he cringes from the thought of enduring such awful coffee then hands me a cup and says choose your bean while I steam the milk and on a shelf covering an entire wall I see coffees from all over the universe from places I’d only heard of where the additional suns or soils never seen on Earth can produce the kinds of coffees I’d only dreamed about but then I stop myself and say wait a minute I asked for a latte aren’t you putting espresso in it
So he says I think you mean a cappuccino because a cappuccino has espresso and I say a latte also has espresso and he looks at me as if I have four heads which is weird for him because he has three heads and he insists I’m confusing a latte with a cappuccino so I reply a cappuccino and latte are the same only the former has a lot of foam whereas the latter has close to none and two of his heads look at each other while the third head eyes me suspiciously and I’m about to summon Wikipedia on my wrist communicator to settle the matter in both his native language and mine when I realize he’s been a barista and he’s been giving out wrong information during his entire career and I don’t want to give him an existential crisis let alone jeopardize our nascent peace so I change gears and say on second thought I’d really like a cappuccino but without a lot of foam if that’s not too much trouble and all three heads sigh and he says coming right up
So it’s the best cappuccino I’d ever taste
So when I return to Earth to be fêted for ending the war I warn the president and all the planet’s councils that in order to keep the peace we have to revise the meaning of latte and though they consider that a weird request they believe it’s a mild concession but to implement it menus have to be changed and coffee shop employees educated and customers corrected but eventually everyone who remembers the original meaning of latte dies off and future generations understand the meaning of latte as ANY coffee with steamed milk but in former Seattle during an archaeological dig in a joint venture between my and my former enemy’s descendants they discover an old Starbucks sign declaring a latte as “A shot of espresso in steamed milk lightly topped with foam” and hostilities begin anew and continue until both species are completely wiped out like blowing foam off a galão which is like a latte but with a higher foamed-milk-to-coffee ratio
About them beans
Who: A human and a former enemy of an unearthly species.
Where: The coffee shop on a spaceship somewhere in space.
When: In the 178th year (or so; who’s counting?) of a seemingly endless war.
What I’m drinking: A latte, which is just a cappuccino with most of the foam skimmed off, apparently.
