Callisto at the Corner Coffee Shop

by Michelle Muenzler

"I was a bear once,"
she says,
stirring her tea.
Steam shivers along her fingers;
sugar crystals dissolve in cautious circles.
"My eyes were stars."

"How did it feel?"
he asks.
His gaze slips from waitress to waitress,
tasting the perspiration beneath their cheap blouses.
Obligatory coffee, now cold, fills his mug.

"Being a bear?"

"No,
having stars for eyes."

She closes her lids and recalls the give and grind of fusion,
of molecules bursting,
coalescing —
a mating frenzy in the vacuum of self.
"It's hard to explain."

A spark flashes in his left pupil, dies.
A god, perhaps,
or a communal dream abandoned.
He sips his coffee.
"I know."

Michelle Muenzler's goal in life is to bring forth the bunny apocalypse and bury the earth with furry-soft goodness. When not working toward this goal, she experiments on her husband with new recipes and builds blockades around her NetBook to protect it from her cats. Her latest fiction can be found in Belong: Interstellar Immigration Stories, Space & Time Magazine, and Daily Science Fiction. As for favorite fruits, nothing tastes so good as memory, so she will always yearn for the juicy-plump blackberries of childhood she used to gently pry free from the forest's fingers...

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