The Beginning

Jake stepped outside his apartment building and into the bright, warm light of the morning April sun. As he lit his cigarette, he cursed, noticing it was the last in the pack. Just his luck. That was his ration for the week, and it was only Wednesday. A fresh crater scarred the street outside his complex.

“Damned Canuck bombers,” he muttered to himself. He didn’t consider that there was probably some down trodden guy just like him north of the border in Ottawa or Montreal or Toronto saying the same thing about damned Yankee bombers.

While he walked down the street, stumbling over crumbling bricks and other rubble and passing the Maryland National Guard troops pulling bodies (or what was left of them) out of former buildings, he stopped at a little run-down diner on a corner that must have been out of the Seventies. Walking through the door, he noticed the floor was covered in a thin layer of dust and the windows were shattered opposite the wiped off, smooth black counter, the only clean thing in the place. Jake tried all the stools at the counter, looking for one that didn’t lean over too much. None did. Oh, well. The fact that the diner still had stools was enough.

“Heck of a raid last night, eh?” asked the waitress who handed him a cup of coffee.

“Did wonders for this place,” replied Jake, and he picked up his coffee. He sipped it and cringed. It was cold.

“Sorry,” said the waitress. Her name was Bertha. “We just got our power back not long ago, and the coffee machine hasn’t been up and running.”

“Yeah,” Jake said. He shook his head and shed his jacket.

Jake set what seemed like his fiftieth cup of coffee back down on the counter. It was the best thing the diner had, so he didn’t have much choice for what he drank. Now that it was two o’clock, most of the recovery crew from out on the street started to come into the diner for lunch. Dishes clanked together and the soldiers chatted and joked back and forth to one another while they filled the diner with a haze from there cigarette smoke. Jake watched the fumes dance in the sunlight, a delicate ballet that was often interrupted by the patrons getting up or trying to get it out of their faces. Jake didn’t mind and figured he should add to it, so he lit up himself. But the smoky atmosphere also reminded him of summer days when he was a kid, sitting on the porch with family and talking, but he was with his numerous aunts and uncles on the lawn, not with hot, sweaty soldiers crammed into a tiny restaurant. And now that he thought of it, the food wasn’t too bad once things got to work. The floor was swept and shiny, gleaming in the bright white lights of the diner. For the first time in years since the Canadian blitzkrieg, Jake finally felt at home here in a small little rundown yet cozy corner diner.