Ripples 2 by KimB

[Editor's Note: Ripples is a serial story.
The author makes no guarantees as to completing the serial.
Publication dates are located in the left side menu.]

02 Cowboy Coffee

The twisted wet wood tossed into the slim walkway for drying, she entered the house.

Not really a house. Not really a place. Not really much of anything at all. Just a somewhere that provided partial shelter from the elements. The roof leaked; a stack of plastic catchalls awaited in a nearby corner. The gap under the doors, providing icy drafts in winter and humid hot draws in summer, had lumps of old towels pushed aside from the nights usage.

A worn kitchen table with two mismatched wobbly chairs, the highlights of the kitchen, held various cooking implements and on one chair, a stack of important papers. The kind of papers that never get sorted or put away, the kind one needs to have at hand but are rarely looked at once they are dropped on top of other equally important at hand papers. A listing pile in constant threat of slipping on to the worn flooring.

She placed the found phone on the table.

She turned to the cabinets, the paint worn from use, and began to prepare a cup of coffee. She smiled at the thought about how she would make the steaming liquid.

Long times past, percolators were the rage, with their boiled and brewed results. Later came drip coffee makers were the hot water was poured into a paper or sometimes gold filter holding the ground coffee. But before that was Cowboy Coffee. Boiling hot water poured directly over coarsely ground coffee. Using a tea strainer made it possible to sip of the dark brew without getting a mouthful of grounds.

She placed a glass measuring cup of water into the secondhand microwave then spooned the coffee grounds into another measuring cup. Glancing at the phone on the table, she waited for the water to bubble. Once bubbles formed along the glass sides, she poured it over the waiting grounds.

Setting her favorite, slightly chipped, mug on the table, she waited for the liquid to darkened and then she poured it through the tea strainer into the mug. She tapped the grounds from the tea strainer into a compost bucket at the sink and sat down.

Hot coffee in hand, she considered the phone on the table.

It was an expensive phone. It looked new.

Whoever had lost the phone didn't drink Cowboy Coffee from a chipped mug.