Bev snores. Loudly, lustily. Her arms thrown up around her head. Her nipples buttoned from the chill in the room. Bev snores the way she makes her lattes, heaping with foam, embellished with artful leaves, flowers, once a polar bear’s face, the sheets twined around her opulent flesh like an Italian sculpture. She does not believe in bras. She knows a reliable source for buying weed. She has five children. She left her husband eight months ago. She’s been working at the coffee shop downstairs for five. Her phone vibrates with rainfall, sparkles, chimes, chirps and beeps, because her adult children and grandchildren are always texting her.

Edith rolls over onto her back, fighting sleep. She must get out of this bed. A long cobweb trails from the pink chandelier in the middle of the ceiling. They lie on a mattress on a red Persian rug, its edges rococo-ed with green and gold. The Persian rug she got in the divorce. – Well, I stole it, said Bev. – It was mine.

Edith pulls the blanket up to her chin. Smells her fingers, redolent with coffee bean aroma and sticky from baroque sex with Bev, mother of five, new adventurer of life, café barista and condo neighbour one floor down.

– You’re my new adventure! shouted Bev before they fell into the bed, and she smashed her lips onto Edith’s.

Edith has been here tonight for exactly four hours and nineteen minutes. Now she must get up and exit this apartment. She scissors her legs under the sheets. Dozes. She has an 8:30 am meeting tomorrow with a graduate student. Her big lecture class is at noon, and there’s a workload agenda meeting at four. She still hasn’t finished grading those essays. Bev offered to help Edith grade essays. Edith said no.

Edith slips out of bed, pokes and peers around in the half-dark for her sweater, her jeans. She tiptoes barefoot into the hall, slips on her flip-flops. Pours herself a glass of water. Gulps.

Because Bev works the morning shift in The Kaffee Klatsch coffee shop at the bottom of Edith’s condominium tower. Bev started chatting while pouring Edith’s valerian-laced coffee, pulling the next espresso shot, and when Edith told her she was a professor at the University of Inivea, Bev told her about her ex-husband, – Masquerading as a loving wife to the U of I Dean of Medicine was my full-time profession for 35 years, she said. – Turns out I was his beard. Sasha, one of my twins, she told me that’s the word for it.

Photo credit: S Mayr

Bev knocked used espresso grounds out of a portafilter.

– I said to him, she said, – you take the house, and give me your sexy fuckpad condo where you met your little twinks for your phony meetings and sleepover conferences. That’s what I told him. I was done with the house, all the dusty stairs, the perpetual cleaning. Laundry. Weeding, god I hate gardening, it’s just all plants, bugs and dirt. Never liked it. My job was never done. I could never go home after my shift.

Edith thought Bev might become a new friend, that’s all, with her flamboyant latte skills and her charming gap teeth. The easy way she talked about kids, coffee, politics, Virginia Woolf, Heinz condiments and different brands of soy milk. The way she moved so musically in her round, Venus of Willendorf body. She thought Bev was just inviting her over for coffee, that’s all Edith thought Bev the barista was asking her. She thought that being invited for coffee to Bev’s condo would be maybe half an hour of idle chatting with a neighbour and a cup of coffee made from exotic, gourmet coffee beans, freshly ground, served in some exotic way,

Photo credit: S Mayr

like with ice cream or lemon rind or a sprinkle of yellow gold. Conversation about grandchildren, divorce lawyers, perhaps some discussion about Orlando and how Bev named her daughter after one of the characters. As a neighbour, Edith imagined occasionally borrowing a stick of celery from Bev; maybe using her washing machine for a load or two when Edith’s machine finally leaked and clanked itself to a proper death. But instead the invitation was for sex. Bev couldn’t stand coffee because she was around it all day, so there wasn’t even coffee.

– I’ve got tap water? Bev said during a sex-break, pointing toward the sink. – I didn’t know you were thirsty.

Edith is never not thirsty. Bev snores.