Wicked

           This coffee shop had become one of his regular haunts for those rare moments when he wanted peace and quiet. Being as out of the way as it was, it had an abundance of both. Usually.

Today, there was a stuffed shirt loudly berating the barista for forgetting some aspect of his ridiculously overwrought and comically complicated drink order. Why people felt the need to exercise their authority over poorly-paid employees was beyond him. What was the fun in making someone already small feel smaller? After all, the saying wasn’t “the tinier they are, the harder they fall.”

           It was so much more satisfying to bring down the large. And this jerk was large—not just physically, although his physique spoke of hours lifting weights and doing bench presses (very likely spewing toxic masculinity while doing both). No, the size of his ego dwarfed his body, inflated as it was to titanic proportions.

           All the more fun it would be to deflate it.

           The person watching this all unfold took another sip of his drink. The barista was one he recognized, if just barely. A petite little thing, mousy brown hair, shy smile. She always gave him a little extra caramel when he ordered a caramel macchiato. Sweet kid. Completely undeserving of the vitriol being rained on her.

           The pompous windbag was now screaming for the manager. “Do you know who I am?!?”

           The barista had her head down and looked to be fighting back tears. Another employee of the coffee shop was trying to calm the fool down. He refused to be calmed down. These types fed on their own ire the way fire fed on oxygen.

The observer watched this idiotic scene continue, leaning back in his chair, his thumbs twiddling with the straw in his iced coffee. He hadn’t thought to do anything today. It was a stolidly boring Wednesday and he’d thought to have himself a bit of break. Though he loved what he did, everyone needed a rest now and then.

Well, as some of these humans believed, there was no rest for the wicked. A small smirk lifted the corner of his mouth. There had to be a joke in there somewhere about his kind quoting the Bible.

Spittle was flying out of the fool’s mouth, his face mottled with his own rage and entitlement. He deserved what was coming to him.

Now, what exactly would that be? A protruding nail catching at his expensive jacket? A stumble over a chair, the drink in question cascading all over his overpriced Italian loafers? An ice cube sliding down his throat and getting lodged there for an agonizingly wonderful five seconds?

           They were all good options, tried-and-true. But now that he had been thrown off his plans for a leisurely weekday, he was feeling…a little more mischievous.

           The ranting carried on for a few more minutes. The beleaguered barista was now openly crying, although she was doing so rather quietly, only the occasional sob being able to penetrate the racket of the complaining customer.

           “That’s quite enough,” observer said to himself. He tapped the tabletop slowly three times with his fingernail.

           Laughter erupted throughout the heretofore silent—save for the enraged customer—coffee shop. There were only several other customers in the shop, but they laughed so hard, they could have provided the laugh track for a sitcom.

           The stimulus for their merriment was the overly-loud jerk—drink in hand, sans pants. The silver buckle on his belt had somehow come undone, allowing his pants to slide down to his ankles, revealing the white boxer briefs stamped with yellow ducks which was his undergarment of choice.

           It did not take him long to realize what happened. In his haste to pull his pants up, he ended up getting tangled in them. This caused him to topple over, and as this happened, the lid on his drink popped open, splashing it all over his front and flooding the floor…the floor upon which he fell face-first.

           It took a solid twenty minutes for things to return to normal. The observer sat watching it all unfold. The chaos was quite delicious to observe. By the time things had settled, his iced coffee was gone and so was his desire to be here.

           After tossing his empty cup, he made a beeline for the exit. At the entrance, he ran into the barista who had been the target of the customer from hell. Up close, he saw that his assessment of her had been spot-on. She had an air of vulnerability about her that made him think of a greenhouse bloom that had never felt the touch of frost. An utterly boring creature. Of no use to one such as him. He liked them arrogant, entitled, stupidly smug.

           He held the door open for her and she nodded politely at him, walking on ahead and turning left down the sidewalk. A bicyclist came out of nowhere, clipping her and making her nearly fall against the glass front of the coffee shop.

           “Watch where you’re going!” the bicyclist had the audacity to call out.

           The observer almost laughed out loud. This young lady seemed to be a magnet for thoughtless jerks. He tapped the frame of the door. One. Two. Three.

           CRASH!

           The inconsiderate bicyclist was on his behind on the cold concrete of the sidewalk, staring in shock at his flipped over bicycle, a nail sticking straight out of the front tire. And the back.

           A smile played at the corners of the observer’s mouth. Not one of his best antics. He usually tried to make these “occurrences” seem plausible, but, well…it wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility for both tires on a bicycle to be punctured by nails. People were just so careless, after all.

           He turned to walk the other way and came face-to-face with the barista’s look of utter befuddlement. Her eyes darted between him and the downed bicyclist, then back towards the coffee shop. Understanding slowly dawned on her face.

           The observer smiled impishly and placed a finger against his lips. She nodded slowly in acknowledgement.

           “Be good now,” he said.

           She could take it as a warning or a threat. That was up to her. If she stayed sweet and good, she would never have to face him. Only the bad interested him.

            He strolled away, whistling merrily, waiting to see what other human wickedness the day would offer up for his divine punishment.