She's The Wild West

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER ONE

I had a bad habit of never looking where I was going, and it often made me fall.

I did it that morning. The morning that, I had no idea, was a butterfly flapping its wings, a domino falling in line, the first piece of a puzzle tumbling out of the box.

I did it that morning, grinning down at my phone, laughing out loud at a viral video of a cat swinging from a ceiling fan, instead of keeping my eyes up.

According to the caption, the cat was perfectly fine and so I didn't feel guilty about laughing to the point of nearly crying. A friend from my freshman year sent me the video and I was so immersed in it that, I wasn't paying attention to anything else. In fact, I didn't notice the yellow caution tape blocking off my place of work until I walked straight into it, tripped, fell, dropped my phone, rolled over and tangled myself in the clingy, neon plastic wrap.

The sky was a foggy, grayish blue and I only noticed because I landed on my back. Somewhere beside me someone sighed loudly while another person tried and failed to hold back a laugh. I found myself chuckling too at my own expense. Then a hand appeared in my peripheral, I was pulled to my feet and I found my two witnesses staring back at me. One of them was my boss.

"West, brother you've been on this Earth almost twenty years and somehow you still haven't learned to look where you're going?" he complained, brushing some dirt off my shoulder before handing me my phone. I smiled and tucked the device into the back pocket of my jeans.

He's right. I do that all the time. I just trust that my feet will take me where I wanna go.

"Yeah, sorry, I was looking at a video of a cat." I explained with a laugh.

It was then that I finally took in my surroundings and I was confused by what I found.

There was light gray dust all over everything. It was all over the ground, it was on my boss's clothes and in his hair, and it was covering the stranger standing next to him. The stranger who, I finally realized, wasn't just wearing a bright, mustard yellow jacket with flashy stripes. The dust was covering the stranger who was wearing a firefighter's uniform. She watched my slow realization and a look of pity began to cloud her face just as the ash was clouding the sky.

Finally, I very reluctantly turned to my side and that was when I saw it. Cafe Moon had burned down. My job had burned down. The roof and over half of the building had clearly been overtaken by a recently extinguished fire. I felt my heart slowly descend into the pit of my stomach and I quickly turned away from the charred remains.

"What happened? What happened to the cafe?"

My boss, Mr. Ramone, sighed again and ran a big hand through his graying locs.

"That new guy Sid was smoking in the backroom and his dumbass somehow managed to light the place up. Stumbled out of the room, high as a fucking kite, with a trail of smoke behind him. We got everyone out, customers and staff, but it was spreading too quickly to try and fight it ourselves."

The firefighter gave him a small, comforting pat on the shoulder and Mr. Ramone just huffed, shaking his head in disappointment.

Mr. Ramone had been the one to hire me at the beginning of my second semester. He told me he didn't usually hire freshman but I seemed like a cheery enough guy to work the register whenever the other staff didn't feel like it. It was something I heard from people a lot. That I was "nice", "friendly", "easily excitable". He turned out to be right though since I never minded working register despite the waves of grumpy, stressed out, hungover college kids that would come in and out of the cafe day and night.