Minneapolis - The Cake Eater Cafe. Two twentysomething guys are sitting across the room from me. Above them, a letterpress print reads: "This HOME runs on love, laughter and cups of STRONG coffee", then in fine print at the bottom: "Caffeine is non-negotiable". The shorter of the two guys - we're call him Shorty - is talking rapidly and excitedly and occasionally hikes himself up on to the table to make a point. His companion is huge, shaggy and nordic looking (read: viking) and is a listener of the sort that can totally zone out while making eye-contact and nodding his head. This talent looks to be a mandatory qualification for friendship with Shorty, who is currently perfecting a stump speech that can be heard with increasing clarity from across the room.

"... And so the complicated thing here is that the army's sort of in charge, but it would be so easy for like all of Egypt become this huge terrorist state, can you imagine? I mean there are already so many terrorists there but they might be [leans forward] IN CHARGE is what I'm saying. Israel - and I was in Israel last summer ... (Friends of the barista come in at this point and rush the counter with this whooping-high-fiving thing that drowns Shorty out for a moment) ... not to mention the remnants of the last temple that GOD built! (leans forward) Jesus' first steps! Isn't that crazy? If there was ever a world war three, that's where it would be. No questions asked. And I'm not saying everything is as black and white as it is in the news, it's just that I don't think the people they get to talk on those programs really appreciate how there are like [leans forward] A FEW SIMPLE RULES that apply here, evil being one of them of course and I'm not saying anything about the muslim population or anything like that but you've got to admit that they probably need democracy but also someone who's a lot LIKE a dictator, wouldn't you say? I mean just culturally speaking..."

Shaggy nods somberly and slowly stirs his coffee. Outdoors, the clouds break for the first time all day and two houses across the street - mirrored silhouettes of one another, perfectly framed in the Cake Eater window - catch the afternoon light. They're boxy little numbers with isosceles rooflines and no more than three or four feet between them at the foundation. For some reason this intimate proximity encourages one of those Eye-Spy type comparisons that are popular in sports or politics or just about any venue where whole lives end up being bullet pointed for the sake of an upcoming judgement by YOU the VIEWER. Eye Spy a .342 batting average, Eye Spy a 5% decrease in discretionary defense spending, etc. I find myself writing bullets.

The house on the right is white. An American flag hangs above the front door, slowly billowing in the breeze. The house on the left is a brownish/greenish color, trimmed with maroon. Someone has built a trellis around the front door that probably looks lovely in the summer, but right now is just skeletal and out of place. Between the two houses, the flag is really the only thing moving.

The house on the left features one window on the second floor, right smack-dab in the center, with what appears to be a green velvet shade inside. Another two windows down below (shadeless this time, I can see a kitchen behind one) flank the front door, which is glass and features a simple wooden-slat style shade hanging inside. All three of the windows are double hung and divide neatly across the middle. The house on the right has its two evenly spaced windows upstairs, both of which look much older and have thin white crosspieces holding the glass in. There are no drapes upstairs, though the lower half of the left hand window does appear to be covered with duct tape, turning the cross in an inverted T. The flag is hanging under the right window and partially obscures the door, which is even further over to the right - shoved up against the edge of the building in fact - and is actually two doors: a thin metal screen coupled with of a warm white winter door behind it. The two doors create a certain layering effect that in combination with the black doorframe suggest seriously considered fortification.

A man - or no, wait, maybe he's just a very old boy - and his parents just came in to the café and now he's ordering for them. The boy/man is wearing one of those big Rastafarian hoodies that look as though they're made of rag carpeting. Shaved across the back of his head appears to be a skull and crossbones that is grown out the way back lawns tend to be, and in the process has become sad and droopy looking. Except now he's in profile, asking his family what types of cupcake they want and I can see one eye is a little lower down on his face than the other and suddenly the scull and crossbones has transformed in to a huge uneven patch of horribly damaged follicles that he has no control over and instead of silly and unpleasant he's rapidly becoming very brave indeed for not shaving his whole head or wearing a hat. The perceptual whiplash catches me off guard, and I spent a moment or two staring, then chide myself for making silly snap decisions about people I don't know. I look back across the street, happy to continue making the same sorts of judgements from a distance.

The house on the right also features a downstairs window that is significantly bigger than the other two (square in fact) and totally covered with a white pull-down shade. It looks to be taped down or sealed somehow, which quite frankly is sort of creepy. Given the double-door/taped-shade issue, the upstairs windows appear to be the only place natural light can get in.

(One of the wifi networks I keep on picking up is called 'Assassins Den', which is exciting and dangerous sounding and might actually be coming from one of the two houses but there's really no way to attribute it to one over the other so I'll just let that detail hang.)

Apart from the size/shape thing, the only other feature both houses share is a complicated web of shadows that are being cast by the tree out front which is gaunt and dead and spooky looking. Visually speaking, the trunk would bridge the gap between the houses if I was directly across the street, but my coffee shop is a little farther down (towards the right, as it happens) and so from this vantage point it looks to be closer to the house on the left.

The shadows fade and intensify as clouds pass and they occasionally give both houses the benefit of very elaborate decoration indeed. The shadows on the white house are more vertical and trunk-like, while the thinner shadows from upper branches land on the greenish/brownish house and are almost synaptic in their delicacy. The bulky shadow that drew my attention to the tree in the first place is cast by a big abandoned nest (an eagle would be hoping for too much) that has crept left-to-right over the past few paragraphs, moving steadily east as a big red sun descends in the west.

Now the street is dark, Shorty and Shaggy have left (as has the man/boy and his family), and I'm sitting by myself in the Cake Eater, trying to discern more telling details about these houses. Then I blink, my eyes refocus for a second, and I realize rather sheepishly that to anyone else in the room it would just look as though I'm staring at my own reflection.

Comments

Aerdna
This is quite beautiful, sir. Many details jump out at me -- the description of the guy's hair grown out the way "back lawns tend to be", "synaptic in their delicacy". Nice. Very, very nice.

Nate
To those of you who thought I'd left Minneapolis already: don't worry, I have. This was written at the end of February, but was lost for few weeks while other things grabbed my attention and now, suddenly, it's March. Please forgive the chronological/geographical mismatch.