Excerpt: Oubliette

Kimi caught the bus and rode it up to Cary, where she got off in front of her apartment and made her way up the stairs. It was simple enough to unlock the door and to toss the hedge clippers into the apartment. They would lay there until she got off of work that evening, but as she had no housemates and indeed no friends to speak of, it wasn’t as if they were going to be found. Kimi put the letters and necklace in the large wooden box she kept right by the door. It was a momento, a keep sake for the resurrected for someone to know how much they were missed, or how much their guidance had been needed through the ages. Modern Sernians still wrote to their primitive ancestors, asking for blessings that their parents did not want to give, for good harvests and safe travels when nothing else could provide them with such. The boxes remained through out the ages, well maintained. It was a silly tradition, but Kimi supposed that her practice of doing the same with her parent’s grandparents was equally so.
She then made her way down the street in the darkness and towards Starbucks.
When she arrived, she saw her manager, Greg, hanging around out front of the store with a cell phone up to his ear. He was bouncing about. After all, it was around twenty below at four in the morning. He closed the cell phone as soon as he noticed her.
“Kimi, I was trying to call in Lameka. What are you doing here?”
“Andrew called in again, didn’t he?” Kimi asked.
“Yeah, but you don’t always have to be the one who covers for him.”
Kimi sighed and crossed her arms. “Lameka won’t come in early and you know that no one else will come in on Friday. When are you going to learn to stop scheduling the worthless sack of shit on Fridays?”
“That’s a little harsh, Kimi,” the man said as he moved to open the door. “His father is ill, he can’t help that.”
“A little suspicious, don’t you think, that he’s always gone on Fridays without fail? He’s been doing this for the past few months.”
“You’re paranoid, as usual,” Greg said, letting her into the warm store. But he had a smile on, which Kimi did not return. “Let’s get moving then, neh? We’ve got to get opened in about half an hour.”
The morning rush was, as was usual for a Friday, horrendous. It was the last little bit of the week and people needed that extra kick in the bottom to make sure that they got through the day. This particular starbucks attracted two different kinds of people. There were the suits, the men and women who needed something to wake them up enough to finish the journey to work. They liked Kimi a lot. She didn’t stick to the company policy that she was supposed to look like she was having fun, and she came across as blunt and often times even rude. They even joked with her about it, trying to get her to smile. They were reminded, someone once told her, about the Sernian executives and co-workers at their companies, and they appreciated all of the reminders that they were about to go back to work with aliens. After all, it hadn’t been more than four decades since the Sernian came.
Then there were the students.
The students, who went to VCU and U of R and the piddly little community college that Kimi couldn’t remember the name of she’d been away from it for so long. She hated how optimistic they were, how bright and full of hope for the future they were. The art students always seemed to proclaim that “Art is Truth!” and the English majors always fought over who was the best horrible writer to come out of the early 19th century. The business students and the medical students she could deal with. It was the humanities students, the deluded souls, she couldn’t stand.
At least Greg had made them back off with the exorcisms and prayer beads. The Christian Students Group just about had her ready to tie some people into knots and blow her cover.
When they finally entered the dead period, Kimi had the distinct displeasure of sitting and listening to a group of those humanities students, most of them the Christian student’s group, trying to explain the basics of Christianity to a poor Sernian soul who was politely sitting through the evangelistic speech. Kimi suspected this was another one of those people who were studying human cultures that were left after they tore up the place.
As one of the few decent looking people in the group ordered a drink, which slightly annoyed Kimi, who was waiting for Lameka to show up so she could go home, a tall, swaying black man walked into the shop. Kimi only knew that the lanky, effeminately dressed young man was male because she had seen him looking like a man once before.
“Kimi, girl! How are you,” he said as she handed off the drink to her customer.
“Bertram. How are you?” Kimi asked dryly.
“Girl, just how many times do I have to tell you to call me Mercades?” He asked, leaning against the counter as Kimi started to make a drink. “Is that for me?”
“No.”
“Oh.” He leaned back a bit. “So, gonna answer?”
“I refuse to call you a car.” Kimi replied. “Besides, you look more like a Volvo to me.”
Bertram stood up straight. “I KNOW you did not just call me a Volvo.”
Kimi sighed. “I meant to joke.”
“Oh.” The smile returned. “My god, Kimi girl you need to work on your pre-sen-ta-tion.” He separated the word with a few snaps. Why did Kimi even bother to talk to this man? He was generally worthless, a student at community college where he spent too little time in classes and too much in the commons talking to the other worthless people in the community college system. But he still persisted in talking to her, and since her boss has been bugging her to make friends he and his group were better than nothing.
“So, what does a brother have to do to get a Milky Way around here, hmm?”
“Venti with vanilla bean mocha caramel frappachino blended coffee.” Kimi put the cup in front of him. “Drink fast, this cup’s only meant to last about an hour.”
“Girl, you are so good. I swear you… read my mind or something,” he said, waving his hand, then picking up the drink.
“You come in every day and get the same thing at the same time. Of course I’m going to have it ready for you.”
“Well, I guess,” the boy said coyly. He stirred the drink with his straw. “So. What are you doing next Friday?”
“Aside from working?” Kimi asked. “Nothing, I suppose,” she replied.
“Excellent! I want you to come out with us?”
Kimi paused in her motions of wiping down the counters. “What do you mean, us?”
“You know, me, Derek, the guys.”
“You usually don’t like company,” Kimi replied.