Coffee: 14 Caffeinated Tales of the Fantastic

COFFEE

Edited by Alex Shvartsman

PUBLISHED BY:

UFO Publishing

1685 E 15th St.

Brooklyn, NY 11229

www.ufopub.com

Copyright © 2013 by UFO Publishing

Stories copyright © 2013 by the authors

The Perfect Book originally appeared in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, December 2012

Toilet Gnomes at War originally appeared in Stupefying Stories, November 2012

The Seven Samovars originally appeared in Lightspeed Magazine, September 2012

From the Shores of Tripoli originally appeared in Worlds of Fantasy & Horror, Winter 1996

Dungeons and Dental Plans originally appeared in Abandoned Towers, July 2010

The Coffeemaker's Passion originally appeared in Bull Spec, Spring 2011

Caution: Contents Hot originally appeared in From the Asylum, April 2007

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-0-9884328-3-3

All rights reserved. No part of the contents of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher.

Cover design: Emerson Matsuuchi

Interior art: Maggie McFee

Typesetting & book layout: Melissa Neely

E-book design: Elizabeth K. Campbell

Logo design: Martin Dare

Copy editor: Bryan Thomas Schmidt

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www.ufopub.com

COFFEE

14 Caffeinated Tales of the Fantastic

Edited by Alex Shvartsman

Table of Contents

Alex Shvartsman

Foreword

A.C. Wise

At the Everywhere Café

Ken Liu

The Perfect Book

Beth Cato

Toilet Gnomes at War

Peter Sursi

The Seven Samovars

James Beamon

The Civet Whisperer

Jonathan Shipley

From The Shores Of Tripoli

Teri Babcock

A Darker Brew

Matt Mikalatos

The Cup of Truth

Tim McDaniel

Dungeons and Dental Plans

Oliver Buckram

The Man Who Heard Doughnuts

Cat Rambo

The Coffeemaker’s Passion

E.C. Myers

Caution: Contents Hot

Katherine Sparrow

Sexiest Fun Time Drug

Charity Tahmaseb

Ghost In The Coffee Machine

About the editor

Acknowledgements

For the men and women of the U.S. Armed Forces who have given their lives in defense of our country.

FOREWORD

Alex Shvartsman

My name is Alex Shvartsman, and I’m a coffee addict.

I managed to stave off this addiction for the first thirty-five years of my life. Coffee was my secret weapon–since I drank it so rarely, a single cup could turbo-charge my caffeine-susceptible brain. And then I began writing fiction.

Coffee and fiction go together well. A little too well. I’m now at the point where I find it difficult to write new words without imbibing a cup of java first. I like to joke that coffee deserves a co-author credit on most of my stories. And I’m not alone.

Having spent a fair amount of time hanging out with other science fiction and fantasy fans, I learned that–in addition to great books–there are three things 99.9% of them love: cats, bacon, and coffee.

There have been a lot of excellent cat-themed anthologies over the years. Recently, Baconthology was published to fill the small void in the hearts of bacon fans not yet clogged by consuming actual bacon. And yet, no one seems to have made the obvious leap and published a book of speculative stories about coffee. This volume seeks to correct that terrible oversight.

Within you’ll find fourteen caffeinated stories that run the gamut from dark to light and sweet. I sought to include every flavor, except for that burnt swill in the office coffee pot.

So grab your favorite mug, savor that first sip, and flip the page.

Happy reading!

At the Everywhere Café

A.C. Wise

Hilo threads cream into the coffee and watches it swirl widdershins, a skein of smoke turning the brew milky-dark. Bottles—thick blue-and-green glass, flattened into rounds—chime softly over the door as it closes. When she turns, they will be gone.

The café shifts, a motion only Hilo feels. The next time the door opens, the world beyond it will not be the one her last client—the tattooed woman—stepped out into, her breath heady with dark roast spiked with rum and flavored with orange peel, her eyes bright with the future. Whoever enters through the door will be a stranger, coming from a world Hilo has never seen.

It has always been this way. She sits at her table in the café and worlds reveal themselves in grinds brewed, poured hot or cold, laced with syrup or milk or cream, a different combination for every scrying. Yet sometimes, when the café’s air grows torpid with summer heat, in the space between one blink and the next, Hilo sees sand under an indigo-bruise sky and the wind smells of cinnamon.

She lifts the tattooed woman’s cup and sets it aside, ignoring the rings of coffee left on the tabletop like scars. When she looks again, they will be gone, too. Everything vanishes here eventually—sepia lines of spilled coffee, and the shards of dropped cups, men, women, and everything in between. Almost everything. Once they step out her door, she never sees those who seek her wisdom again. Only their cups remain, with cooling liquid and bitter dregs, a memory of the time their lives crossed hers; a reminder that they moved on and Hilo remains.

And for all the lingering cups that surround her, coffee has never touched her lips, only passed through her hands. She knows it by its smell, rich, heady—a hint of hazelnut here, vanilla there. What would it taste like, if she could brew a cup for herself? Anytime she’s tried, some compulsion stops her, a flare of pain, the cup slipping from her hand to shatter and vanish.

Hilo pushes the thought away. She focuses on the newly poured drink, and the world coming into line with the café’s door.

In the swirl of cream, she sees a smoke and ivory world. A weary world. The door opens, admitting a woman as worn as the world she comes from. Instead of blue-and-green glass, the chimes above the door clatter hollow—reed, pale wood, or bone. Hilo looks up. Dust lines the crevices in the woman’s skin, dulls her hair, and gathers in black half-moons under her nails.

Without asking, Hilo knows the woman has come here from a factory for recycling the dead. The scent of it clings to her. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust; ghosts make up the woman’s shadow, pool under her feet like spilled ink, following her wherever she goes.

Hilo pushes the creamy coffee aside untouched, and looks up.

The woman ducks her head, lowering lashes over her eyes. Her voice is as gray and soft as the smoke from her factory. I want…

Hilo holds up a hand, stopping the woman before she can get any farther. Delicate lines of pain trace the veins beneath the woman’s skin. She is so full of need, and it breaks Hilo’s heart to say what she says next.

It doesn’t work that way. Hilo folds her hands in her lap, making no move toward the clean cups—glass and ceramic, wood and stone—piled to her left. She doesn’t touch the sleek, silvery pot of coffee, or the gleaming brass espresso machine.

The woman looks up. Her eyes are startling violet—the only thing bright about her, rimmed now with the first glimmer of tears.

Hilo sighs, hiding weariness and gentling her expression as she explains.

You can’t call love into existence where there is none. It would be like trying to grow a tree without a seed. I could trick your eye into seeing roots, a trunk, branches, leaves, but you can’t climb an illusion into the sky.

But… The woman’s hands go to her belly reflexively, before falling to her sides, fingers loose and long.

Hilo’s expression is soft, but she makes her eyes hard. The woman’s shoulders slump, and she turns. Hilo can’t stop her tongue.

There are teas. The words are as bitter as the leaves Hilo describes, a soapy taste, slicking her throat. At the house down the road. They can lighten your burden, if you can’t carry it without love.

The woman freezes between Hilo and the door. Tension straightens her shoulders into a sharp-edged line where they slumped a moment before. But she doesn’t respond.

Hilo watches her all the way out the door. She presses her hands flat against the table’s surface and releases a shaky breath.

She knows she shouldn’t, but she pulls the milky coffee close, studying the cooling surface. In a factory made of dust, a young woman and man work side by side. There is a glance, and maybe one or the other of them mistakes it for love; perhaps they are simply both very lonely, hungry for something other than the feel of dust against their skin. Their fingers touch, their lips touch, their bodies touch, a flurry of stolen moments over the course of a month or two. Then, finding herself suddenly full, the woman is frightened of how hollow she feels.

If Hilo had let her make her request, would she have asked for a potion to make the man fall in love with her, or the other way around? Or would she have asked for a brew that would let them love their child?

Hilo’s hand hovers over a slender glass cup, narrow but deep. She could pour again and see whether the woman walked on down the road to the tea house, or whether she walked home. She could follow the woman’s story all the way to the end with a glass that deep—children of her children gathered around her knee, an old woman in a house full of love, or an old woman alone, bent with years of work in the dust factory, the ghosts filling her shadow, her constant and only companions.

Hilo pushes the cup aside roughly. Too rough, and it hits the floor—a constellation of shattered glass. She closes her eyes. What other answer could she give? What else would the coffee permit?

With her eyes closed, she does not think of sand and cinnamon. She does not think of the world beyond the café door. There is nothing for her there. There is no map to lead her out of here.

Unless…

Behind her closed lids, she imagines the tracery of veins shuttered over her eyes as lines sketched on a creased and re-creased paper. All the coffee she pours must come from somewhere. If the coffee can find its way here, its scent redolent of the secrets of a thousand worlds, then why can’t she follow the lines backward? Find a path leading out?

Hope is a dangerous thing.

Hilo opens her eyes. The glass shards under her feet are gone. She sighs, reaching for a plain, ceramic mug—dark-blue, the logo long since faded, the rim chipped sharp enough to cut a careless mouth. She smells smoke underlying the roasting beans, worked as deep as the dust in the woman’s skin, gathered over years into patterns in the café’s ceiling, which is now pressed tin. Without looking, she knows the world outside the café’s door is all neon and darkness, smeared with rain.

Before she even pours she knows this cup will be bitter, black, and gritty with dregs. When the door opens, there is no chime—only the sound of heels stamping the floor and a coat flapping to scatter drops of rain. The man removes a battered fedora and approaches her table. For just a moment, there is a shock of recognition, but…no; she is mistaken. Everyone here is a stranger.

You the brew witch? he asks, pulling a battered pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, and putting one in the corner of his mouth. It’s that kind of café now. His eyes are narrowed, but Hilo doesn’t miss the tremor in his hand. It takes three tries for the man to spark his lighter.

Who wants to know? She tries to be cool and fails just as hard.

Look, lady, I don’t have time for bullshit. Is this you? He produces a card from the same pocket as the cigarettes.

It smells faintly of tobacco and sweat, but it bears her name. When did she get cards? Hilo looks away to hide her frown, gestures to a chair to buy time.

He perches on the chair’s edge, restlessly jiggling his leg. I’m looking for…something.

Something, or someone? Like the tremor in his hands, Hilo doesn’t miss the catch in his voice, either.

Maybe both. He toys with the ashtray, which has appeared among the scatter of her cups—thick, warped glass, fired clay, bone—coffee cooling in every one. Can you help me or not?

It’s much harder to find something when you don’t know what you’re looking for.

You’re telling me, sister. He reaches into his pocket again; it must contain dimensions, to hold so much and still lie flat against his chest. He produces a folded piece of paper and hands it to her.

The note