Cinnamon Tea And the Art of Being Normal

I loved the cafe like this, empty and quiet as the weak 4 am blue gave way to a bright, eye-burning sun.

As always, I was in my usual booth, the tea I'd ordered an hour ago coagulating as I typed up the story. Less an endeavour in writing and more one in sculpting, as I hacked away at the blank screen, one keyboard click at a time.

Angela, the sole, dedicated employee, moved a cloth over the gleaming counters, waiting for customers.

Like every morning, it would be a long wait. Our cafe was sandwiched between two mega-chain cafes, and had absolutely no selling point.

Once in a while a high-powered workaholic who couldn't stand in line would burst in, gratefully take a quick coffee and bolt. Or some polaroid-taking teenage girls would enter, and amuse me while they irritated Angela. But aside from random bursts of activity, I was the only usual customer.

After an hour of silence passed, aside from my frequent jabs at the delete key, Angela sighed, and I smiled as she walked over and sat down in my booth.

She was normal, practical, and unchanging, her long, straight black hair held back in a simple ponytail.

The one difference today was the small burn between her fingers and the faint smell of cigarettes that lingered on her, no matter how carefully she washed her clothes or sprayed on perfumes.

"You fall off the wagon again?" I asked, pausing in my chipping away at the page. Angela scoffed, much less angelic and innocent than her name suggested.

"I'm trying to lose weight, Althea is getting married." She frowned down at her hands. "Is it that strong?"

"Nah." I waved a hand dismissively. "You can only tell if you breathe. I'm joking!" I said to her unamused expression.

"I'll have to be more careful." Angela muttered. "I don't want to give people the wrong impression."

I raised my eyebrows at that, but said nothing. She was a consummate professional, and constantly worried about what Ron, our absentee manager thought. Ron showed up once on Angela's first day, and made appearances on inspection days, but otherwise was about as likely to show up as a unicorn was.

Angela strongly suspected that Ron was a drug dealer, and only really stayed because he paid her highly, even in the absence of human beings entering the cafe.

I once tried warning Ron that Angela thought this, and he laughed. It was the lesser of two evils to let her keep believing it.

Angela tilted her chin at the computer. "Weren't you supposed to hand in a draft two weeks ago?"

"I got an extension," I replied meekly, and Angela shook her head. I knew the following words out of her mouth, her disapproving tone, her very correct observation that I was spoiled and stupid.

She was far too used to being the oldest sibling, and the family bread-earner, sending money back home every time she got a paycheque.

"You need to get a real job." Angela tutted, her chin resting on her hand. I liked her hands, small-fingered and delicately rounded. And warm, unlike my perpetually frigid ones.

"I have a real job." I reminded her and Angela raised her eyebrows. "I do! It just has weird hours and I like it." I certainly wasn't paying rent by sitting at a booth in a cafe and working on a story that really only existed in the void of my diseased mind.

"Hmm." Angela rolled her eyes, straightening the sugar packets. "One of those online jobs?"

"No." I closed the computer. "Not one of those work-from-home situations, it's in the real world. I get to work with people, so I like it."

"You like working with people?" Angela asked her accent curling into every disbelieving word. I made a face.

So maybe I wasn't a picture of extroversion. Or normalcy.

"I do!" I protested, throwing up my hands. "More than you based on how you scowl every time someone walks in." I took a swig of the now cold, sticky-sweet tea.

"That's why the second real customers come in, you get up and run?"

"I'm trying not to be a squatter." It was a lie, never in four years had this place ever been fully occupied. "

"Mhmm." Angela huffed and then both of us looked when the bell at the front of the door jingled.

"Hi." The man said uncertainly and I pinned him with a look. Cut up hands, hidden under his sleeves. He was going to drink the coffee, but this guy was one of my customers.

"Hi, what can I get you?" Angela asked, adopting the sweeter tone of voice she used for convincing customers that they should stay here rather than traipse over to the mega-cafes.

"Coffee? And eggs if you still have them?" The guy looked around the cafe and his eyes landed on me. In one second, his eyes crinkled with desperation, disbelief then back to shaky resolve.

I hated the spooked ones, but whatever. Angela bustled away to make it and I moved because he wasn't going to.

"Employee of the year will be back soon." I informed the man, "You might want to hurry up." To find this place, to find me, the guy had already paid Ron.

He held up the coupon Ron had given him. "I-I-"

I stared at him, slightly disgusted and partly amused. Payment was done, but this was always the funniest part. Where they wondered if they counted as human beings anymore. "Spit it out."

Killing came easy to me, it always had. I was lucky to have a job that let me do what I'd always been good at, I knew that. And I relished it. I usually had to wait for my unsuspecting target to get separated from the herd, but my current target was some kind of obnoxious loser apparently because his guys couldn't wait to leave him alone.

I'm not the torturing type, nor do I kill with any kind of special mark. That's for weirdos and try-hards. This guy got shot with a gun I stole away from one of his men, and I heard his girlfriend shriek in the bathroom, but she didn't dare come out.

For a second I stared at the bloody spatter coating the wall behind him. Angela hated messes; not so much as a grain of sugar ever filthied her gleaming white counters.

All in all, the whole thing took four hours. It was bad times for everyone, economically speaking, and Ron had to take boring jobs.

These days Ron was lucky there were still morons like cafe-guy who were still too scared to get their hands dirty. As things got crazier and crazier- which they were, considering I passed three crime scenes on my way back- my job was definitely a dying industry.

I shook myself out of it, not one for introspection. The more you thought the more your brain could latch onto the idea this was wrong, and then voila, you're useless.

I sent a text to Ron, inflating the time it took me slightly. He paid me by the difficulty and I always had to strike a careful balance between getting paid and accidentally giving him the idea I was some sloppy, slow killer.

Ron would hire someone else, and in this economy? No, I couldn't afford that.

When I returned, Angela was seated at my booth, face lit up by the screen of my laptop.

"Your thoughts?" I asked and Angela lurched, surprised to see me.

"A serial killer that spends most of her time in a cafe," Angela said uncertainly and I smiled. Sue me, I'm not creative, hence the fictionalization of my own life. "It's...."

The usual word was disturbing.

"Sorry, I've not been to many cafes, so I kind of borrowed heavily from this place." I shrugged, waiting for the usual litany to come out of Angela's mouth.

"Yeah, I got that. The only employee that works here is Angel, and the flaky manager is Rob." Angela looked up, eyes empty of fear and full of incredulity.

I relished that. "What about the narrator's perspective. What did you think?"

"Oh, that's the only thing that was good about this." I heard clicking as Angela moved through the document. "Very visceral imagery, and I'm guessing it's based on you?"

"Yes." I smiled, deeply amused. "You know the laptop's password protected?"

"It's not." Angela turned the laptop, pointing at the sticky-note I'd taped next to the mousepad. "How old are you?"

I held up my hands in surrender. "I was getting tired of forgetting."

"I wanted to see what you spent all this time on, and honestly, I'm kind of impressed." Angela declared. "Have you sent this to anyone yet?"

"My agent is still waiting." A sad-sack employee at a middling publishing company. In charge of sorting through the work of pretend-part time writers, hoping to find the next great Novel buried under a pile of pulpy trash.

I wasn't afraid of Ron finding this thing either, he'd probably laugh and buy a copy. And make fun of some of the descriptions I put into the book.

The woman I'd drowned for her husband to get the insurance money became much more beautiful in the story. Angela, or "Angel" came off much nicer, and "Rob" was halfway intelligent instead of some boring middleman parsing through the dark web to find jobs that the FBI hadn't posted as part of a sting operation.

The man I'd killed while his kids were still in his flat became a trained assassin, instead of a desperate man lunging at me with a letter-opener. All the changes improved the story as far as I was concerned.

"Well, it's not as bad as I thought it would be." Angela informed me, which was charming. She never gushed over anything, so any tone slightly above deep disapproval was high praise. "Did you have to do a lot of research for this?"

I thought about my mental Rolodex of murders and assassinations, on a perpetual loop I played at night when I got bored, or had to wait on the train, or people were talking and I had to pretend to listen. "Yes, lots of research."

Angela nodded, and closed the laptop. "How does it end?"

I stared at her. I had not thought about that yet. And I wondered how she thought the story ended.

"What do you think?"

"I mean, ideally, the killer becomes a good person. Or gets killed." Angela said easily, half-shrugging.

"That's a good idea, how do they become a good person?"

Angela sighed. "Uh, they get a dog or get married or something."

I grimaced. My love life was non-existent. Truly, I had no interest, the absence of interest in fact in love. And dogs?

No. Emotional neediness and walks. I preferred fish.

"Anything else?" I pinched the bridge of my nose. This was unexpectedly vexing. Not what I had thought would happen.

Ideally, Angela read it- I wasn't actually dumb enough to leave my laptop and password available- cross referenced other killings and realized with horror that she was working with killers.

She panicked, called the cops, and it was a nice story that got me tossed into a prison. Instead, I was getting writing advice? Some stolen plot from a movie?

"Anything else?" Angela repeated, pausing in lightly stretching.

"That this killer could do?" I prompted her, hands clenched around the booth's back.

"Do they have a family?"

Boring, normal people I'd discarded the second I lied about college and disappeared. "No."

"Any interests?"

"Mainly just killing." I replied tightly and Angela laughed. "What?" Maybe Angela was a killer, normal people didn't laugh at that, did they?

"Okay, so maybe I was too generous earlier. This is a really poorly written character." Angela waved at my closed laptop.

I narrowed my eyes. "What are you talking about?"

"Nobody is like that, it's like saying Angela is just into pouring coffee. That's my job. People have more interests than that. You can't say, favourite colour, knife silver. Favourite sound, screaming."

"Can't you?" I asked, rolling my eyes. My fingers flexed on the booth and I fought the urge to scream questions at her like a maniac.

Did other people have more interests? Did they really not sit like me, burning with boredom and an urge to scream so complete that it thrummed through every tense muscle until it was hammered into social anxiety?

My interests started and ended at killing. Killing plants, fish, people, Angela if she kept on annoying me.

I could kill her with the metal container she put napkins in. Slowly burn her with the shitty coffee she poured, fry her face off in the oil grill.

"Thank you for the advice." I said carefully and I think it failed because Angela looked blank for a second.

Not blank, but blank in the mixed up way I was never able to decipher.

"Are you hungry?" Angela asked, getting up. "I can pretend to work. What do you want?"

I slumped into the counter seats, still stung by her accusation. "You think my character is bad?"

Angela sighed. "Oh, I get it." I was so surprised by her warm hand on mine I forgot to flinch away in disgust.

"You're afraid of rejection, aren't you?" Angela pursed her lips with sympathy I didn't deserve. I was a killer. Cold blooded enough that my hands were freezing and my eyes dull.

"Rejection." I said, wondering how on earth she only saw what she wanted to see. Every time.

"The character is not bad, okay, let's practice. What's the character's favourite show?"

I shrugged. "Don't have one."

"Not you," Angela scowled, so familiar that I laughed in relief.

"I guess," I tilted my head back enough to catch sight of the muted TV nesting on the counter. "The news."

Angela blinked, deeply unimpressed. "Favourite food? Drink?"

"Scrambled eggs and coffee." I replied and squawked when Angela hit me lightly on the head. "What?"

"Not the order you heard earlier today, moron."

"Ugh. Pancakes. Tea with cinnamon." I rattled off my mother's favourite dish. Or perhaps just the breakfast I made for her when my father forced me to.

When she was lying in bed, half ill from sickness, and mostly sick with guilty disgust when she saw me.

"Coming right up." Angela grinned and disappeared and I buried my head in arms.

This was hard. Likes. Dislikes. I ate food that I got at random. I watched shows that played in front of me, either as part of ads, or on someone else's screen on trains and buses. I listened to music that played in grocery stores, as I bought my favourite silver coloured knives and hummed the sounds of my favourite screams.

I don't have interests. Or likes. Or dislikes. Just boredom, and I enjoyed ending things.

Ending people. I wondered how upset Ron would be if Angela died and then decided it wasn't worth the effort of winning over Angela's replacement all over again.

I liked Angela.

"Tea, with cinnamon." Angela smiled as she placed it on the counter and I grabbed her wrist as she turned to go.

"Thank you." I said suddenly and Angela made a face.

"What's gotten into you today?" Angela scolded lightly. "Drink your tea, killer."

"Killer?" I narrowed my eyes and Angela giggled.

"Your character, looks just like you, talks just like you." She shrugged and I watched her eyes catch the news that a gang leader had been found shot dead in his flat.

Angela didn't change her mood, just went and made pancakes, that she laid out in front of me.

"Syrup?" Angela asked and I shook my head. I didn't even like pancakes.

"Would you be friends with an assassin?" I asked and Angela raised her eyebrows. "Humour me." I drank her tea to appease her.

"Probably not." Angela took a bite from the pancakes to make up for my lackluster interest in them. "I'd be scared they'd kill me."

"What if my writing wasn't just a story?" I asked and Angela stared at me, looking slightly irritated and slightly tired.

"What if I left earlier to kill someone? What if that was my job?" Now I was just making excuses to kill Angela, wasn't I?

Angela pinched the bridge of her nose. "What are you doing?"

"Humour me." I almost pleaded. "What if it was my job and what if you worked for a guy that just connected me to kills, and-"

"Rob?" Angela snickered, rolling her eyes. "Who spends all day finding people for you to kill on the 'dark web'".

"Yes." I drummed my fingers on the counter. Waiting breathlessly to hear if we were still friends.

"It's your job I guess." Angela waved a hand when I didn't let it go. "As long you don't track blood and brains into my cafe, I couldn't care less."

"Angela." I declared, exasperated.

"Why are you telling me this?" Angela asked tiredly. "Tired of being a killer?" She wiggled her eyebrows, eating more pancakes.

"I don't know." I felt tired and dizzy and ill and regretted telling Angela anything. My throat- I gasped for air.

"You could have stopped at any time. I made so many excuses for you." Angela ate more of the pancakes. "I bet you didn't even know you were allergic to cinnamon." She made a sad face. "Shocking that it happened."

I toppled off the chair, gagging and gasping. I heard Angela crying on the phone to the cops, and I remembered we both worked for Ron.

Laughing, I made my peace. At least the boredom would end.