Lucinda's Diner

Some things never change, becoming tourniquets of circumstance as they save and strangle. Like a Rockwell painting, freezing a single moment. The thousands of brushstrokes needed are ignored, as are the paint and canvas. All that matters is that frozen instant preserved under glass; a memory living in real time.

Lucinda's Diner was such a place; a living, breathing mausoleum, a snapshot from a different time where you could order comfortingly mediocre food.

It was situated at the end of Apple Drive, past Harvey's Grocery, but if you reached the Pet Emporium you'd gone too far. If you were coming from the direction of the church (and you usually were), you simply needed to take a right at the intersection with the CVS. You couldn't miss it, so long as you knew where to look.

Damian wasn't coming from the direction of the church. It had been at least a decade since he'd done that. But he did know where to look. Even now, he'd have been able to walk the distance from his parents' house to the diner blindfolded.

Apple Drive was empty. As the sky closed dreary eyes on daylight, one by one the little shops fell into shadow. Damian walked in the center of the road, wary of the trees, of the darkness, more out of habit than fear. Each time the wind stirred some hidden leaf or an animal scampered at his approach, he paused. He waited. He kept moving. His heart rate remained the same. It had been this way for days as he carried on in numb silence.

He didn't know what drew him back to the diner. Just that his feet kept taking him onward in the direction of the place that symbolized all he'd run from. There was nothing left for him here. Not any more. And yet, as he neared Lucinda's, he felt its pull of familiarity. It stuck in his throat and offered a quiet embrace.

The parking lot was full of leaves, but that was nothing new. Bev, the owner, had never taken the time to clear them away or clean the gutters, making the diner seem perpetually abandoned. What did it matter, when the locals all knew the diner was always open? Regardless of the hour, the door was always unlocked and Bev was behind the counter. Which was why, despite the neon "Welcome" sign being dormant, Damien felt at ease inviting himself in.

The bell at the door clinged, singing his return to deaf ears. No one looked up. No one smiled, crying," Dame! You're home!" The diner was almost empty. Almost, because the withered figure of Bev was still behind the counter.

"Evening, Bev," Damian murmured. He stepped his heavy boots on to the black and white tile, not meeting the eyes of the restaurant owner. For a moment he remained in the doorway by the cash register, feeling helpless with indecision. It felt wrong to be here.

It felt wrong to be here without Emma.

Damian shivered, sneezed at the dust, then made his way to the bar stools beside the jukebox. When he arrived, his usual black coffee was already out in front of his usual seat. With a wry chuckle, he dropped his bag and rifle under the counter lip. He wrapped his hands around the white ceramic mug.

"I could always count on you for a cup of burnt Folgers." He pulled the mug closer, like a shield. "Is it still $8.99 for a cup of coffee, two eggs, a hash brown, and a slice of toast?" He looked up at the menu behind the counter, squinting at the yellowed, fading print. "Yup. Sure is. Honestly, Bev, I don't know how you manage to stay in business with the prices being so low."

He spun in his seat to face the rest of the diner. Honestly, there were a lot of reasons why Bev shouldn't have been in business. Prices aside, the food was vile. Somehow, the bacon was always both burnt and undercooked. If you ordered an over-easy egg it would come back-over hard. If you wanted over-hard, it was guaranteed to be runny. The toast was the same consistency as margarine-drenched cardboard. The hash browns... weren't even worth thinking about.

On top of that there was the diner itself. Lucinda's was not a clean place. Dust bunnies were so prevalent they may as well have been welcomed pets. The windows had fingerprints from thirty years ago. The pictures on the walls were too fogged with grease to identify. What was perhaps most offensive were the heinous, bright pink counters. Seriously, they were the color of Pepto Bismol. An absolute crime against interior design.

And yet Lucinda's Diner had been a hometown treasure since a woman named "Lucinda" had been alive to run it. Unlike IHOP or Panera, you knew exactly what you'd get at Lucinda's. Abject mediocrity with enough sodium in your all-day breakfast menu to kill a corn field.

Damian hated it.

Emma had loved it.

And so, every Friday after his shift at Harvey's Grocery, he'd go home, rinse off, and pick up his little sister from school so they could get ice cream at Lucinda's.

Damian sighed, spinning back around to face Bev. Carefully, he pulled the green toy soldier from his pocket. He set it on the counter, anxious to no longer touch it, to feel how real it was.

“You can still come here, even if I’m not with you,” Damian said, watching Emma fiddle with the soldier on the counter.

She just shook her head, not meeting his eyes. “Lucinda’s isn’t real unless we’re both here together.”

He didn’t know what that meant. He’d brushed it off as silly kid logic. But now, more than anything, he wished it were true. He wished he wasn’t really here alone.

Flakes of dried blood split from the tip of the toy gun and became part of the dust coating the counter. "Do you remember when I gave this to Emma?" Damian whispered. "I did it in this very seat." At some point he'd grasped the mug again. His fingers tightened their hold. "She was giving me the silent treatment because I joined the army. I brought her here because it was the only way I could think to cheer her up.”

Damian closed his eyes. "I thought I could escape. Escape this place. This life. I'd make something of myself. I wouldn't have to hear about how much of a damn failure I was, every fucking day.

“I think..." he chuckled darkly. "The day I enlisted was the only time Dad actually told me he was proud. I’d hoped Emma would be proud of me, too. But... you know what the first thing out of her mouth was?"

He looked over at Bev's cold, silent stare. It hurt less than seeing the soldier. "She asked me who was going to kick the monsters’ butts if I left."

Not for the first time, Damian wished the coffee in his hand was spiked. "It's my job, you see. Every night I had to go into her room and threaten the monsters in her closet. I’d tell them that I’d kick their butts if they bothered her." He shrugged. "One of those things that you do once for a little kid because they have a nightmare. And then you have to do it every night.

"I got her the soldier from the hardware store. Same aisle as that plastic locket I got her for Christmas two years ago. And I... I told her..."

This soldier would keep her safe for me.

It was getting hard to breathe. Damian looked over at the jukebox, away from the toy soldier's accusing stare. "Where were you?" it seemed to ask. "Why did you think I'd be enough when real monsters came?"

How was I supposed to know? How could I have known that monsters were real?

Damian stood abruptly and dragged his feet to the dead jukebox. How many of his quarters had this piece of crap eaten? Enough that a single song request could cost almost as much as Emma's milkshakes did. He'd always make a big stink of it, of course. He'd say if Emma liked Elvis Presley so much he'd go to the pawn shop and buy her an iPod. But nooo. It wasn't the same.

They had to play "Jailhouse Rock" on the jukebox. They had to dance together in Lucinda's Diner. They had to dance and Damian had to do Elvis's leg shake move publicly and then ask to buy his "little lady" a milkshake while slicking back his hair. Then Emma would order a full glass of rainbow sprinkles with a dollop of ice cream and half a damn can of whipped cream on top. Damian would order a black coffee because he was bussing tables at the bar after he chased Emma's monsters away. And for two wonderful hours after that he would listen, enthralled by the dramatic retellings only a kindergartner could experience and articulate.

But then Damian left.

Oh God how he'd rationalized. The dreams of a college fund for Emma. Of being able to support them both once he got out, spirit her away from their shitty parents and shitty town and never look back. He'd get them their own apartment in the city. He'd buy a jukebox for their living room that didn't require quarters. He'd get a Costco membership and buy her all the sprinkles she wanted.

She just had to survive four years without him.

God, he'd been such a fool.

If it had really been for her, he'd never have left.

"I didn't know, Bev. I didn't know..." Damian's head drooped to rest against the jukebox. The soldier continued to scowl at him, toy gun pointed at his heart. Bev didn't answer.

It was too much. The silence. It cracked something in him at last.

“Why won't you talk to me?" he screamed. “Why will no one talk to me?”

He knew why. He wasn't blind. He could smell the rot. But he threw the framed Frank Sinatra photo he yanked from the wall all the same. The picture hit the coffee pot beside Bev's corpse, causing it to crash against her side. Her wrecked body slid the rest of the way off the counter with a heavy thud.

For several moments, Damian did nothing but stand in horrified quiet, breathing in, breathing out. Feeling everything and nothing as he stared at the empty space where Bev, however rotten, had once been.

"I'm losing my mind," Damian muttered. "I'm arguing with a dead person." Slowly, he slumped back into his stool and peered into the moldy mug of coffee.

"But what else is someone supposed to do, when nothing will ever be the same?"

You go home to Lucinda's Diner, and watch the pain pass by through a stained window.

But Emma was right. Home wasn’t real unless the two of them were there together.

"What if I was too late?" Damian whispered. "What if I never find her?"

Her body wasn't at the house. She and the dog were still missing. This small flare of hope had been what sustained him as he tore the sleepy, abandoned town upside down.

But Damian had been searching for days, and the last time Emma had called was days before that. She’d been screaming through the speaker.

The town was empty. The monsters had already come through. Maybe Emma had escaped with another family. Maybe…

Maybe he was being foolish.

Tears, hot and brutal, fell from his eyes into the cold coffee. He blinked and more fell as rain on the soldier's head, causing the dried blood to pool at its feet.

"I don't know if this story will have a happy ending," Damian said, "But I have to try. For her. I have to try."

Once more, he stood. shouldered his pack and rifle.

Darkness had completely fallen. It was their time to hunt. He should stay in a defensible space. But…

Let them come, he thought. And let them fail. It's my fucking job to kick monsters' butts.

Damian took one more look at the painting of what had once been his life. He drew a breath. He let it out. With a cling he opened the diner door and stepped back onto Apple Drive, leaving Lucinda's Diner to remain much as it had always been. Except for the addition of one toy soldier, left to guard the memory of what used to be.

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