Fiction by Iris J. Melton
“How many this week?” I asked.
“Three,” she answered.
“Three’s a lot. What did they say?”
She continued typing. The tap of the keys was the only sound other than the dog licking his paws under the table.
“The usual. Not the right fit for us. The selection process is so subjective. Thank you for submitting, but…”
She continued to type. “Would you mind making the coffee? I just want to finish this bit before I take a break,” she said, adjusting her tortoiseshell glasses by the earpiece.
I ground the dark, oily coffee beans and placed them in the carafe of the french press. When the water I put in the microwave began to boil, I poured it over the ground coffee. Then I collected two teacups and saucers from the cabinet. None of the teacups matched. She only used bone china teacups, never mugs. She said the coffee tasted different from a teacup. Lucy and I drank from mugs at home. But it always felt like drinking coffee was a secondary activity when I drank from a mug. I was also reading, writing, or driving. But when I drank from a teacup with a saucer, I was only drinking coffee. That was the primary activity.
“I dreamt of bees again last night,” she said as I placed the cups on the table.
“Bees?”
“You know those films where they show all the bees crawling over a big piece of honeycomb?” She pushed the press down to the bottom of the carafe slowly and then poured the coffee into my cup. It smelled of bittersweet chocolate and orange peel.
“Was it scary?”
“Scary?” She considered for a moment and pushed a loose strand of her dark hair behind her ear. Then she poured coffee into her own cup. “No, not scary. There were just…so many.” She held the cup under her nose and inhaled slowly. Then she lowered it to her lips.
“Have you been reading about bees?”
“No. Swords,” she answered.
“Swords?”
“For the book. How they’re made. The percentage of carbon to steel. How a smith forges and heats and quenches them,” she answered.
“Quenches? What’s that?”
“It’s when the sword-smith plunges the heated blade into oil or water to rapidly cool it. Part of the process,” she answered. “I like that word. Quench.” She took another sip of coffee. The teacup made a small, clinking sound as she replaced it in the saucer. “What would it mean if it were a noun. What would a quench be?”
“Oh, I don’t know…maybe a small, nocturnal mammal that eats only…honey?” I mused. I rubbed the knees of my corduroy trousers and looked at the gray afternoon sky out the window.
“Hmmm…I like that. Only honey,” she said. “How many for you this week?”
“Five,” I answered.
“Five’s a lot. Time consuming,” she said.
“What else am I doing?”
“Still, five. Five resumes, five cover letters. It’s a lot of stories. A lot of different stories.”
“Everything’s a story,” I answered.
“Oh, I forgot to tell you…I got an interesting rejection last week. It wasn’t the usual rejection letter.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“They said so. They said This is not our usual rejection letter. Then they complimented me on my writing and suggested I send them more.”
“Well, that’s encouraging, isn’t it?” I asked.
“A no dipped in honey is still a no,” she said. “Imagine if it were like the old days and I had to print everything and go to the post office.”
“That would be a lot of postage,” I said.
“Expensive…paper, ink cartridges, postage.”
“But you’d get to know the postal workers. Probably by name,” I said. “And they’d probably talk about you when they went in the back. They’d say, It’s that aspiring writer again.”
“Oh, I hope they wouldn’t say that.”
“What would they say, then?” I asked.
“Writer. Just writer.”
She poured more coffee into my cup, and then refilled her own. The loose strand of hair slipped out from behind her ear.
“Don’t they die after they sting you?” I asked.
“What?”
“Bees. Don’t they die after they sting you?”
Her mouth slowly widened into a wicked looking grin. “They do,” she answered.
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
“Just an evil thought,” she laughed. She stretched her hands on each side of her cup, with the fingers outstretched. The nail of her index finger was broken down to the quick. “I know what a quench could be…a writer in her forties who desires to be published but has not yet found a publisher. In spite of actively looking.”
“Assiduously looking, maybe,” I said.
“Yes. That’s better. Assiduously looking.”
“Or maybe a quench could be a man in his forties who desires to be employed. But has not yet found a job. In spite of assiduously looking,” I said.
We sat in silence for a moment.
“Where are you off to next?” she asked.
“The post office, oddly enough. I have to mail some pillows for Lucy,” I said.
“Who ever thought people would buy so many decorative pillows?” she asked. “I think Lucy is brilliant.”
“When we were first married, Lucy used to buy a lot of decorative pillows. We even used to fight about it,” I said.
“It probably wasn’t the pillows you were fighting about,” she said.
“No, it wasn’t.”
“What were you fighting about?” she asked.
“I don’t remember. I just remember being really angry about the pillows. There were so many!”
“Like the bees.”
“The bees?” I asked.
“There were so many,” she said.
Originally published in The Bluebird Word in July 2022.
Iris Melton is a former waitress/attorney living in the Appalachian Mountains. She learned to swim from a book and has a perverse affection for the Oxford comma.
