Short story: In the Window of the Cafe By Karl Whitney - - - - The writer sat in the window of the café, noting down events as they occurred. Really, there were no great events to record, just the banal and habitual occurrences that usually took place in this part of the city at this time of day. A woman passed, holding a crying child in her arms. She struggled to hold a shopping bag on her left wrist as the child’s twists and turns threatened to undermine the mother’s balance. He turned to the counter behind him and ordered another coffee. His large notebook lay open before him, his cheap fountain pen lay at an angle on the page, the scratchy black ink marking the path it had traced until the moment it fell. It was late morning. The café was quiet and it was still some time until the lunchtime trade would arrive, turning what was now a haven of peace and quiet into a bustling canteen of workers. His coffee had arrived, and he sipped it – too much milk. He had embarked on this project of observation, partly because he was, for the moment, unemployed, and partly because it struck him as a nicely pointless exercise. The modern world, he thought, fetishizes usefulness to a ridiculous degree, he thought. Everything had to have a purpose: if you were doing this, it was because you wanted to get there. And if you didn’t want to get there, why were you doing this? Such attitudes saddened him, but were so pervasive that sometimes he found himself sharing them (the pervasive attitudes). So, sacked from his job inexplicably, he found himself drawing up elaborate plans on large sheets of paper for the novel he would write. It would be about people in his home town, and it would be drawn mostly from his experience. But first he needed to observe them, to record them in his notebook with pithy commentaries and images swiftly captured in as few words as possible. Every morning he would cycle the couple of miles into the city centre from his rented flat, and settle into the chair in the window of the café, and just write, uninterrupted. He would record scrupulously everything he saw, and he would in turn process this information, rewrite it, and finally compose and edit it into the great novel that would give his life purpose. She had left him, and now he really didn’t know what to do. -------- Stories | Home | About This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.