the turkish coffee story, the girl with the hole in her crotch, and other stories

two women and one man are with me. i’m sitting next to one of the women, and across from the man. the woman next to me, (m_____), jumped out of the blue silence that followed watching someone barely avoid a speeding car outside our window. m____ said to the woman across from her (s_____), “tell him the turkish coffee story! tell him the turkish coffee story!”

at first, s_____ was reluctant to reveal this story, because it painted her friend (someone m_____ does not always appreciate very much) in a poor light.. m____ insisted and insisted on the turkish coffee story. m_____ assured us that she never tired of hearing this story.

after the turkish coffee story, s_____ told us the story of the people who hired the girl with the hole in her crotch.

later on that night, i heard the story of the many cade’s of minneapolis, kansas. i heard the stories of the evil roommate. i told a few stories of my own, too.

while at a bar, after the movie, i caught pieces of stories from other tables in between conversations of our own, and everyone’s telling stories and telling stories and telling stories. in my living room, my sister’s two cats wandered out from their hiding places – inside the fireplace, and behind my dresser in the closet - and mewed their miseries at us, how they came across the world in a crate and now all these people are here telling stories in the wrong language late into the night.

all of us telling stories and telling stories at a restaurant, at a bar, and in my living room until the witching hour and we’re out of sherry, and some of us have to wake up and put on respectable clothes and go to work in the morning like nothing happened in the dark.

but still we all speak, and the ripples of our sentences bang through the open space. the vibrations remain in the air far longer than we can consciously hear them. walking around, all these sub-audible words merge in the ear drums, down deep where subconscious microphones listen to the garbled dreamspeak of all those drifting stories.

breathe in, and breathe these stories still vibrating in the atmosphere.

check in tomorrow and mayhap you’ll hear the turkish coffee story, mayhap the girl with the hole in her crotch, mayhap something else entirely, pulled from the air around us where all these words vibrate like invisible, living things.

sometimes i take requests.