At the Black Rifle Coffee off of Camelback . . .

Short Story
06-13-02024

At the Black Rifle Coffee off of Camelback they keep the ‘Stevia in the Raw’ in old ammo canisters. I inspect them for authenticity and determine the corner distressing is a laser engraved imitation. The alpha illusion is shattered. They, like me, have never seen the heat of battle. They’re just another pretend soldier, full of sugar alcohols.

The on-screen menu above the register is cycling through banner ads for  ‘HERO Beverages’. I order the Iced Betsy Ross White Mocha, and my wife orders the Liberty Bell Latte. The drinks come handcuffed together. My sweet wife and I take synchronized sips to keep from spilling. We’ve been married over 3 months, and collaboration is key.

We drive home with elbows resting on our truck’s center console, holding cups on a short chain. A partial eclipse has just begun and the city of Phoenix is graying out, but folks don’t seem concerned. Even the pigeons are unperturbed, pecking lazily at the old french fries laying in the median. Phoenix is a city too accustomed to extremes and high-weirdness. The sun is a harsh God, the desert is a strange land, and we try to ignore the show like the show ignores our needs.

But my sweet wife loves the show.

“I wonder what God my Norse ancestors blamed for these celestial cucks?” I ask my wife and the air.

“You can’t blame the government,” my wife replies. “That’s refreshing.”

She is right. The moon and I strike a brief alliance, and the gray light dims my paranoia. I stop hearing the coins fall from disaster like a slot machine jackpot. I forget that this morning I saw a tanker ship destroy the Baltimore Bridge, an apartment block in Gaza implode, and a Buick Roadmaster T-bone a Tesla Model S all in the same hour. I stop hearing this casino’s carnal cacophony. It drowns in the eclipse's huge silence.

“It's hard to believe the moon blocks the sun for free.” I say to my wife. “It could make a killing naming a corporate sponsor for each eclipse.”

“LuluLemon would be a good one,” my wife says. “Or that company that makes my menstrual panties.”

She takes a sip that catches me off guard and I spill Betsy Ross on my shirt.

“Sorry lover.”

She dabs at the stain with a digi-camo napkin and I look out the window at two men on the roof of a vape shop gazing skyward through paper framed glasses. They’re holding hands.

“Who decides when we get to be happy?” She asks me and the dull light. “And if it is anyone other than us, what type of life have we surrendered to?”

I breathe and reply, “I’m not unhappy, are you?”

“No, but let’s always make sure we have a say in the matter.”

The handcuffs are metallic pink, and I have a dirty thought. I remember this is a breast cancer awareness promo — it makes my dirty thoughts dirtier in several directions.

My wife rolls down the window and snakes her forearm through the hot air like a Chinese dragon.

“The thing about time,” she shouts over the wind, “is that it doesn’t seem to happen without the movement of my body, even if it is only the expanding of my chest, the beating of my heart, the electrical twitch of my neurons. Time only stops when I stop, and I only stop when I die. It's impossible to figure out who keeps who moving.”

“But if you died, my time would trudge on.”

“I only know my own time, lover. Other people’s time is, well . . .  I’m going on faith that it's there at all.”



She lifts her Liberty Latte and I hustle Betsy to my lips. I don’t feel like a sip, but a marriage is about compromise. I turn on a new age podcast we parasocial-relate with on Sundays. This week's guest is a Native fighting to stay out of jail on 8-year-old charges amassed at the Standing Rock DAPL showdown ::

Our people have 16 major Gods.
The God of Humans is the lowest. The lowest,
but still very much a God, very powerful,
but young. The youngest God,
one that doesn’t know its own strength.
One who is easily fooled.

That God is in us like our breath is in us.
The God is our breath, all of our breath,
our collective breath. 

When we are in the womb,
we are connected to another place,
we have no breath,
and then you come into this reality,
and you're able to take a breath.
As soon as you take that breath,
now you're in union.
Now you're part of the unitive power,
the unitive experience that is here for us all.
Every time, every birth,
that is the eternal first breath of God.

It doesn’t bother me all that much, being the youngest, dumbest God. It explains why everything feels so confusing, and still so holy. It explains why we keep confusing destruction with power – setting fire to the Earth like a deed of ownership. We could destroy the moon, we have the nuclear tonnage. We could crack it like an egg and shatter its power to cuck the sun. If the moon were in the way of some lucrative beach front property, its days would be numbered.

“Killing God is so much easier than keeping God alive,” my wife says. “It takes half hour to learn to shoot someone, and half a decade to learn to save them from the damage of the bullet. That’s my new job, to help bring God back from the brink of death.”

“Are you regretting Art School?” I ask.

“Never. Artists are the combat medics on the battlefield of our universal soul.”

“I thought you were trying to stop using war metaphors?” I say.

She looks at her cuffed cup.

“It’s the coffee.”

We take a sip together. She drains her Liberty and lets it drop, it swings from my half drunk Betsy like an ol’ ball n’ chain.

I pull into the driveway, kill the engine, and watch the light return.

“What shall we do with the rest of our date day?” I ask in rhetorical jest.

She goes to her studio and paints three canvas targets for our AR15 evening.

Live

Laugh

Love

. . . In hot-pink loopy wine mom font, each word overlaid with jet black crosshairs.

We drive for 45 into the Sonoran desert, to a nice flat piece of nada we know well. She sets her paintings up at 10, 25, and 50 yards. We fire and fire until it's too dark to see, then turn on the truck floods and fire some more.



We’ve made a confetti of the triple L to rain over us till our next date night.

I kill the lights and we pound our love into the desert with each others bodies. The dirt sticks to us like a second skin. The moon looks down and we look back.

My sweet wife wonders aloud . . .

“Who is more jealous of who?”