CAFÉ PATHÉTIQUE
ALM No.93, September 2026
SHORT STORIES
Tonight I found myself at a friend’s show, a play that answers the question:
“What if the Bermuda triangle was actually a café, but instead of luring boats to their death, it was a nexus of romantic connection for hopeless, self-indulgent assholes?”
In just 90 minutes, every character who entered this mystical café was thoroughly unraveled to their most humiliating freaked-out form, given shape and color and meaning by a script that reads like the kind of grainy daytime television that never won any Emmys in its heyday but found a second life in hospitals for people freshly waking up from surgery. It even had that timeless element of a B-plot driven by the idiosyncrasies of a rich old pedophile you have to ignore for the sake of not writing the whole thing off.
It goes without saying that my friend was perfectly lovely and normal in her role, obviously. I got to give her flowers, she got to not immediately dissociate in a lobby of strangers after the show. We've got a good thing going. But this isn't about her.
At the end of the 90 minutes, someone yelled “cut!” and revealed the show to be this play-within-a-play-within-a-movie nonsense and the director of the whole charade was the aforementioned pervert. Then the actors bowed, smiling through their blush-flayed and apology-stricken faces, like they knew exactly what they just put everyone through as an ensemble. As members of the community, to their own community.
It was ridiculous.
Even more so when I realized the biggest offense I took to was not the blasphemous theology major being far too into religious sadomasochistic role play nor was it the impromptu strip tease of a father on his daughter’s wedding day, no, all the negative feelings that clung to me long after I smacked my hands in dutiful applause can be credited to the empty seat next to mine.
An aching bloomed behind my ribs because I happened to sit in a row filled to the brim, each seat taken, save for the one to my left.
I must be as stupid as I am wide because instead of being grateful for the extra leg room, a luxury that does not come by often, I spent that entire time trying to convince every one of my senses that you’d be taking up the space beside me.
I imagined our knees knocking as the house lights dimmed, the comfy feel of our jacket-clad elbows pushing up against each other to find that sweet spot to slot into for the first act. An actor on stage came out wearing the most heinous synthetic bob, and I sprouted an even more heinous joke about it in record time. I twitched to my left until I remembered that my instinct to gossip was moot. I kept my gaze pointed forward but I didn’t care to take in a single thing I could actually see or hear. I only cared to remember that heady cologne of yours and how it might have greeted me the closer I got to your ear. I thought about the press of your cheek to mine, moving like a pin overwhelmed by a magnet, an unspoken agreement to keep whatever I whisper ‘just between us.’
I imagined you laughing through your nose at the quips that come so easily to me when you’re close, knowing my mind is at its happiest when it’s whirring away in a writers room, drafting the next punchline that’s sure to level the air from your lungs. We both know better than to make a scene and pull focus, but I’d be giving you a run for your money. I saw our thespian friends and foes grace the stage and I theorized how the weight and rattle of your nudging would give away how you felt about their performance. Fast taps for ‘yes,’ one tightening grip for ‘no.’ I thought. I wished you were there to point out all I didn’t catch the first time.
At truly painful moments, I saw myself whipping in your direction and sharing a look that communicated a thousand words in the span of a second. I fantasized about catching your high-summer eyes at the right moment to laugh without sound; to ask a question without words; to find you looking at me without doubt; to make sure you aren’t seeing how much I’m straining to look at you each chance I get. I saw couples fall in and out of love with each other on a loop before me. I heard lines that might sound horrible or silly or perfect coming from your lips. I bit the sides of my tongue and picked at the skin of my thumbs through it all. I wiggled my lonesome pinky in the air, tested how far it might have to stretch to reach yours.
The dream retreated to my mind’s edge when I went to give my all-too-innocent friend a tight hug after her performance. A hazy cloud of pink popped and suddenly I was in a narrow, musty room with a nose full of perfect, sticky curls. My ears rung with the crescendoing chatters of loopy actors connecting with their, probably, normal and romantically-satisfied friends. I ignored the pang of guilt that swept across my body at the thought that any one person could tell what I was just conceptualizing and with whom. I pushed away the momentary fear that the word “pervert” had somehow materialized across my forehead for all to see and wonder about. My friend asked if I enjoyed the show and embarrassingly, I couldn’t dredge up a single detail to remark on. I settled for a short script of praise and a warm smile. When my friend turned her attention elsewhere, I didn’t linger. I slipped out before I could be caught in an over-stretched goodbye.
When I re-entered the outside world again, it wasn’t raining like it had been when I first arrived. The night air was colder and I was brought right back to my warm place next to you.
Clear as day I imagined what our walk to the car would feel like if we had gone and left together. How our shoulders might brush up against one another with more and more weight each time, like a Newton's cradle. How we’d unleash a litany of jokes that just couldn’t wait until we got somewhere more private. I’m transfixed at the ‘you’ living in my head and how he bursts into a spectrum of emotion in an effort to explain the layers of his post-show analysis. You’ve said you make a better director than an actor and I wished I could have heard what you may have done differently given the dated material. You’re up there, relaying every thought and assumption about the messaging of the play and its place in our culture and the blah blah blah of community theater in the pacific northwest but how you just love seeing regular people going for what they love. I scrunched my nose at the memory of your sweetness and how the only way to feel it is to feel all of it. It’s maddening how your impression lives inside me like a handprint. It's ridiculous. I’m ridiculous. But I could already hear the tickled yelps you’d let out soaking in every detail of the show’s rehearsal drama I overheard from a mutual friend, re-shaping every opinion you cast initially.
When we made it to the car, I saw us putting up a fight, tails wagging and all, about who’s driving. I see myself caving first and letting you take the left seat again. Inside the car we’re able to finally face each other and gab at max volume, our hands taking turns moving from jaw to knee to elbow to waist.
Everything is endlessly interesting with you. I sat alone in my car, vacantly staring at the ignition for some time thinking just that. I thought about how the ‘you’ I do know treats my thoughts like flowers which you carefully thread with yours to make an arrangement of deep meaning and understanding. I sat in earnest certainty that it would feel no different if, well… everything was different.
I passed under streetlights that striped the road in a sentimental glow and with the right music it was easy to imagine I wasn’t alone in my car anymore. In the pitch of night, nothing shined brighter than the image of your smile as you spoke, never missing a beat as you put the car in reverse; your gentle hand cupping the padding behind my head as you do so. In this story you’d pull out onto the city streets and move your hand to my knee and declare our interpretation of the play superior to any half-cocked judgement stammered by anyone else in the audience that night.
Just the two of us. A couple of loud-mouthed assholes in merry conjecture.
I’ll swat at your arm when you’ve taken your mind off the road and you’ll squeeze me tight regardless of where your hand is. And when you speed up on that rain-slicked freeway, I won't think about where I am. I won’t be holed up in my head, filling in the blanks reality leaves. I’ll just crank the volume on your favorite song and we’ll scream our lungs out and hope the director doesn’t yell cut anytime soon.
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