In West Virginia - Tumblr Posts
Old Friends in WV
Accusations make the coffee bitter. The stranger doesn’t like his coffee bitter, if you can call his creamy slurry *coffee* at all. It’s the only thing the waitress has brought him since he arrived. Steady rain knocks at the window like it’s curious how he managed to pass through it without getting wet.
He’s pouring another dose of cream, unperturbed, while the diner stares at him. Twenty minutes ago it had been a vibrant place; workers between shifts meeting for their coffee and rumors, long distance haulers catching their moments relaxation. It had all slowly peeled away into silence. The stranger did not belong, tall and thin except for wide, heavy shoulders that hung like wings behind his coat a season too heavy. His shadow does not belong. He knows them all.
The stranger doesn’t need to lift his eyes, methodically stirring the concoction in his mug, to feel it. The spoon orbits the curve of the mug once, twice, nine times without scarcely a ripple. When he lifts the mug to his thin lips there is a man opposite him, broad and heavyset.
“Where you from?” It’s a blunt object as much as a question, and a nations worth of paranoia hangs behind the words. This man believes he should be afraid of foreign men in suits, invaders and nuclear bombs tucked into tidy suitcases. But the stranger can sense the deeper fear hiding behind his anger.
“The hell you smiling for?”
The stranger leans back, relaxed. Somewhere in the diner, a phone rings. No one moves to reach it, but every soul in the room feels its tug. Tommy Nichols most of all.
*Because, Tommy, we’re old friends. Don’t you remember?*
Tommy Nichols without warning, becomes a statue carved from terror. The anger that bubbled up out of him, like an animal trapped and caged striking at capturing hands, it vanishes into the cold in his stomach. Tommy Nichols remembers the phone calls. The nightly, incessant phone calls, rising out of bed in the dark, fumbling for a phone that rooted in place seems to run away from him. Listening to the clicking, hissing nothing from the receiver. Waiting. Every night, waiting for something, standing alone in the living room until the silence blended into sounds, and the sounds into words.
Words that he could not bear to remember. Words that come now like black wings across fifty nights.
The stranger turns his gaze to the others, stands. Moments ago they felt emboldened, maybe even ready to strike him. But now they look, all of them, exactly the same as they did in the dark, listening to the phone whisper its designs into their ears. Afraid, deliciously afraid.
*We are all friends*, the stranger says, smiling, *but I don’t believe you know my name*.
The strangers voice is a whisper, the itching familiarity that has lingered with every nightmare and half-remembered waking. It has tiptoed across every mind behind a booth or on a stool in the place, fingers brushing their every waking moment like a rising chill.
*Cold. My name is Cold*.