They Crave Crimson Coffee

  "Then taste it!" I thrust my bleeding finger towards him.

  Pounding furiously against my ribs, my heart was too preoccupied to so much as humor the awkward situation I had just thrown myself into. Austin's murky brown eyes fixated on the blood's expanding edges. Pop music rained from the ceiling speakers into our silence, which I only now noticed as I stood outside the bathrooms and away from the chattering. Austin's stomach becoming a magnet, pulling his head, shoulders, and one of his knees in just as the blood overflowed its cut and dripped off the side of my finger. He shut his eyes tight and inhaled through his teeth.

  "Jeez, Bree." he let out a long sigh before continuing. "The hell is wrong with you? You know I'm crazy squeamish."

  I remember wanting to punch him. He was being ridiculous. He had done something, something that upset me enough to trigger our first fight, our last fight, and the last time we ever spoke to each other. But as the clapping of shoes on concrete and smells of exhaust pulled my mind out of the memory and back to the present, it became harder and harder to remember why. What made me so upset?

  The brick street I sat in front of stretched to my left, right, and far in front of me, twisting and cutting off all around the city. It was a curious place, where wide seven-story buildings squished next to tiny wooden shops. Before I had begun daydreaming, I spotted several young boys on their bikes crossing three lanes of heavy traffic to get to a restaurant on the other side. Scooters, cars, buses, trucks, and trollies all shared the road begrudgingly. The sky was stuck in a shade of deep blue even in the summertime, only taking on a bit of purple at sunset and sunrise, and gray clouds chased the sun around all day. Someone's radio is always playing down the block, flowers pop out of asphalt, the air is thick with dust from construction that no one sees, and a coffee shop can attract larger crowds than the bars on weeknights. It had been this way since before I was born: scared to be left behind by industrialism and scared to let go of its old-town charm. The result was this strange hybrid even the sky found distasteful.

  I was sitting on the sidewalk with my back against a wall waiting for my trolly to come and unraveling the end of my right braid. It was the only thing I could do to keep myself from looking back at that boy, the one who had forced me to remember such an unpleasant scene. He stood a few feet away from me holding a cigarette in his hand with one leg bent and resting on the wall. His deep brown hair was trimmed tight to his head, leaving only a bit of bang that swooped above his left eyebrow. Ripped jeans hung loosely on his boney legs much like his oversized t-shirt with what looked like a picture of several guys posing with guitars printed on it. Nothing about him should've interested me, but I had made the mistake of glancing at his face a little too long.

  His long nose that rounded at the tip like the shape of his face did, his distant eyes that wandered up to the sky every now and then, his posture, ears, hands, clothing choice, and the little sigh he let out that hinted how his voice might sound, were all painfully reminiscent of Austin. Was it only a year ago he and I were practically siblings? The greater part of me didn't want to try to remember.

  That's not him...probably. How could he have changed so much so quickly? No, Austin's hair was much longer and fluffier, and he smiled all the time. This guy's face looks so dark and sunken, like he couldn't force a smile if I paid him.

  Yet, the more I tried to convince myself I was being delusional to stop the memories from flashing back into my head, the more I had to remember what Austin used to be. The stop-and-go traffic promised my transportation would be delayed, a man yelled into his phone in some foreign language over at the bus stop, to which I refused to wait more than several feet from, and the fumes from probably-not-Austin's cigarette were starting to give me a headache. Eventually, I figured it was pointless and let the memories slowly creep back in, even if everything about that summer night made my stomach twist in a knot.