"The Continent Out Back" by Sherry Cassells

I was skin and bone my mother said and she was right, I was Grapes of Wrath skinny, but I  guess Mr. Smalley understood hunger, its strengths and weaknesses, he knew I was a scrapper and that I’d catch on quick. 

You make good coffee? 

If you mean dark and strong and bitter, then yes. 

We were sitting across from one another in the booth reserved for staff, he gestured to the waitress to come fill my cup which she did, she dropped two creamers, two packets of sugar, a lipstick smile. 

I already knew how it would taste by the way it poured out, I could see my cup through it.  He waited for my review. 

It’s okay to guzzle with food but it’s not the kind of coffee you’d go anywhere for. The coffee I  make is for farmhands, hangovers and fed-up women – fresh ground and heavily roasted.  

Grit, he said. 

You gotta get the right filter for the grind is all. 

I mean you. Start tomorrow at six. 

In the morning? 

That’s right. 

Can’t. I do breakfast at the farm. 

Seven. 

This story is not about coffee. It is not about my skinny stint as a waitress, it’s not about the farm and its brink, it’s about the little shape of pavement like a continent behind Smalley’s Diner,  not right off the kitchen but the other door, you go down the dark hallway like a passageway to what matters. 

Going through that door was maybe how it feels when you get off an airplane, you sort of slipped into a different self, and people saw how you really were maybe because in that place you let them see or maybe because in that place people looked.

We saw the struggles of life and how they landed, the way Sammy the cook talked about his sick child, Maureen the waitress and the way her eyes slammed against the distance,  Smalley, and how out back was the only place he wasn’t nodding from table to table adding in his head like crazy, and the dishwasher Maurice who washed invisible dishes as he stood out there,  leaning against the brick wall, he told us it was Parkinson’s, I was writing in my head, sentence after sentence, it was the way I kept track, sort of like what Smalley did but with words.  

Things like age and shape and color and pasts didn’t count on our continent, I said that word once about it, that it felt like its own continent, and Maureen, she took a drag of her cigarette and in white words said, I always thought of it as an island and then Hermie chimed in and said, same thing and then Sammy the cook said, no man is an island. 

That was a long time ago, the diner is just a whiff of burned toast now, the farm is a field,  our house like a broken tooth, the skeleton barns. They turned our road into a bypass and I  wonder if the people who drive by ever think what it was like on the inside of that house looking out. 

I didn’t know then but I discovered that poem Sammy got that island quote from, I was in a  Goodwill looking at the books and I picked one up and opened it right to that poem and I’m kind of into poetry now, not necessarily the rigid or the romantic kind, but the kind of poetry that sort of maroons you, the kind that feels like opening the door behind Smalley’s.

Sherry is from the wilds of Ontario. She writes the kind of stories she longs for and can rarely find.  litbit.ca