The Coffee Grinder - Flash Fiction Story by Julian Matthews

 

The Coffee Grinder

Flash Fiction Story 

by Julian Matthews

It looked like it belonged in a museum, behind glass. It had a single drawer, like a clothes chest, but much smaller. You could hold it in the palm of your hands.

It was woody brown, unvarnished, and the top half was a brass half-globe, unpolished with a tiny window, openable, heart-shaped. It had a small hand-crank, the kind you see on documentaries on Amish country.

She said it was a coffee grinder. Manual. You would put the beans on top, turn the crank and the ground coffee would end up in the tiny drawer. She explained how it worked. She was moving house and asked whether I wanted it.

I hesitated, thinking here was another household contraption that I would use once, then put back in the box and it’ll probably end up in storage.

I am an instant-mix kinda guy. I don’t want to work for my coffee.

Coffee, sugar, hot water, milk, stir.

Sometimes, I use the 3-in-1 sachets. Tear, pour it out in a mug, hot water. Done.

This looked like a lot of work.

But she insisted. She did not seem emotionally-tied to it.  Maybe she used it once or twice then switched to an electric one.

She’s moving from her apartment back to her mum’s house. It’s a little further away, out of town, and I will be seeing less of her.

It’s a sentimental journey. Not only is she packing and parting with stuff in the apartment but she’ll need to clear her mother’s things.

She says how she breaks down every time she opens one of the boxes, a wardrobe of clothes, the dresses she wore, the kitchen items she used, a dining set she favoured for special guests, albums of photographs. She said going through the photos was the most painful, and reduced her to tears.

It’s been seven years since her mother passed.

It’s hard to differentiate the useful from the sentimental, whether you really needed something as a reminder, a keepsake – or just give it away to charity for someone else who could use it.

I watched a TEDTalk once in which a woman author related how she went jogging in Rwanda, Africa, and spotted a blue sweater on a boy passing by. She stopped him because it looked familiar. It had a graphic of Mount Kilimanjaro in front.

Back in the States, she was going through puberty at the time and was filling up on top, and the subject of typical schoolyard teasing. The boy allowed her to examine the sweater and sure enough, the label at the back had her faded name on it. It made the hair on the back of her neck stand. The sweater had travelled 5,000 miles from New York to Africa. She’d given it to Goodwill 10 years earlier.

We never know where the things we give away are going to end up.

I don’t know if the coffee grinder meant anything to her.

Or whether her mother used it.

Maybe it was the heart-shaped window on the top, that she slid open, as if opening her own heart.

She leaned close and urged me to do so too. You could smell the coffee grounds from a time long ago in it, a specific bracketed episode in someone’s life, in her mother’s kitchen perhaps, maybe hers. She needed to let it go.

I took it.

Julian Matthews is a mixed-race poet and fiction writer from Malaysia, published in The American Journal of Poetry, Beltway Poetry Quarterly and Borderless Journal, among other journals and anthologies. He stumbled onto poetry by accident six years ago at a writing workshop. That happy accident has turned into a rabid compulsion.