Edge of End Read Free

town’s entrance which was further in the distance behind
me.
    I didn’t have any idea how
long I’d been travelling or how much time had passed. I wasn’t
wearing a watch, and there was no sun to guide me, just the
gloomy daylight from an incomprehensible source illuminating both me and
the town .
    The wind had stopped blowing. The
usual sounds of nature that you’d expect to hear were
absent–complete silence, broken only by my footsteps.
    This town reminded me of the clichéd
towns, where the army or scientists experiment and test their
atomic weapons, then abandon. It seemed to have been built for the
purpose of nothing and with that in mind, I even thought of it as
the town of
nothingness.
    A ghostly smile briefly came across my
face when I noticed a sign reading ‘café.’ There might be a working
telephone inside. My legs lugged me towards it.
    The notice hanging on the door said it
was open. I tried to figure out anything inside, but the shiny
windows showed only my reflection. Unlike the house windows, the
windows of the café had been cleaned. Either that or the dust
hadn’t touched them yet.
    In the reflection I saw a
blond-haired man peering at himself, with narrowed blue eyes–his
eyes reminded me of the girl I had seen swinging in the yard. I
checked myself over like I was seeing my reflection for the first
time. This is you , my mind told me. I even nodded to myself as yanked the door
open.
    Inside, the café appeared small
compared to the size of the building. The bar sat right in front of
the door. I slipped in hesitantly and cautiously looked around as
if I was waiting for a maniac to fall upon me with a
knife.
    Instead, I saw a woman behind the bar
who was most likely the manager, and a man sitting opposite her. As
I entered, she raised her head acknowledging me as she peered over
the man’s shoulder, but the man didn’t flinch.
    Closing the door carefully, I walked
in and seated myself at one of the small tables and waited for the
woman to serve me. From out of the corner of my eye I caught her
whispering into the man’s ear. She did so without turning her eyes
away from me.
    Her expression wasn’t unfriendly–more
curious. I tilted my head slightly to avoid her imposing
stare.
    It was at that moment I realized, I
was stranded. Thoughts began racing through my mind. I might have
been robbed, kidnapped and dumped far away from home. Since I
didn’t remember what I had been before and what kind of business I
had been doing, who knew? It could be true.
    The only questionable thing was that I
didn’t seem to have been beaten: my clothes weren’t ripped, and
there were no apparent wounds, nor did I have a headache. As far as
I knew, the cause of losing my memory could probably have been a
good strike to the head, which surely would have been aching by
now. With this thought playing in my mind, I ran my hand along the
backside of my head in search of a bump. Nothing!
    I heard someone distinctly clearing
its throat, and I lifted my eyes instinctively. The woman was
eyeing me from head to toe with her stern look. She didn’t have to
say anything; her eyes said, ‘What the fuck are you doing in my
café?’
    She was a rather plump woman with a
round face and a mass of frizzy dirty hair that sat matted and
tangled on her broad shoulders. If it hadn’t been for that hair of
hers, I would have thought she was a man.
    “ Don’t even try,” she cut
me off with a gesture as my lips twitched to utter a word. “No
coffee!”
    “ What? I didn’t even…” I
stammered, my fingers flinching in my empty pocket.
    “ He didn’t,” she chortled,
glancing back at the man who still hadn’t turned his face to me
yet. “Did you hear him Malcolm? Have you ever met anybody like
him?”
    The man didn’t respond. I was
perplexed, wondering what that coffee had to do with
her.
    “ Ma’am, I’m sorry,” I
tried to change the subject and ignore her blatant laughing at me.
“I’m lost. I need a little