The diner was crowded and noisy and hot, and smelled like burgers and bacon and coffee and spaghetti. Maybe some fish. The customers looked excited and the waitresses looked bored. Big glass windows framed heavy traffic on 2nd Ave., compressing and stretching like a worm.

New York in August was a lot like Mexico in August, but without all the sandy beaches and sexy tourists and frosty drinks, and more humidity and sewage and traffic.

But it was Thursday evening, so things weren’t all bad. That golden hour between clocking out from work and before the Yankees started playing, and that meant time to eat with friends before eating with Mom at home.

Anthony, still in his brown UPS uniform, slid into the diner booth next to St John and said “Hey.”

“Hey,” said St John.

“‘sup,” said Johnny Lawrence, opposite.

Nuckles, next to Johnny Lawrence, said nothing, but he never does, so that was as good as hello.

None of them looked up from their phones at Anthony. Status quo, which was good – it meant they hadn’t yet heard the news.

Anthony hunched over and leaned in. The diner was loud, nearly drowning out his loud whispers. “Did you hear about Fingers?”

Two of them stopped tapping and looked up. Nuckles, who didn’t look up, said, “Fingers Ronzini?”

“Yeah, Ronzini. Him.”

“He dropped outta 10th grade. That was..what..four years ago? Five?”

St John asked, “Didn’t he try to scrape together money a few years ago for an internet thing? The next Facebook or some shit?”

Anthony nodded. “Yeah, just like that, but totally not. More like Instagram, but for porn. ‘Instagasm.’ Remember?”

Nuckles finally looked up, laughing. “Yeah, Instagasm. I remember that. That was either the dopest name for a web site or the lamest. I’m gonna go with lame, since it never happened.”

“Well, THAT never happened, but you won’t believe what did. Apparently, he raised A FUCK TON of money for it last year, borrowed from some Russian guys, and made all kinds of promises, then, less than a year later, he dips. Completely off the grid. Gone.”

Johnny Lawrence says, “What happened? They finally realized he was never gonna deliver and they cut their losses? Along with this throat?”

St John says, “He was the biggest, dumbest dreamer. Too dumb for school, too dumb to know when to quit, his fucking head always in the clouds. I can’t believe he was able to raise any money at all. He probably realized he was never gonna be able to deliver and he cut his own throat.”

Anthony shook his head. “He was smart enough to realize he couldn’t do it, but he’s way too dumb to realize he’s like the walking dead. So he skips. Takes all the cash he had left, like 70 or 80 grand, and goes south. Like…WAY south.”

Nuckles says, “First off, how far south are we talkin’? Like, Tottenville in Staten Island? Or like Trenton in Jersey?” His eyes went wide. “Further south? Than Jersey, even?”

Anthony closes his eyes. “How you passed the sanitation test.. South of America. South of Texas, even. Like way the fuck south.”

“How do you even know? He sent you a postcard?”

“Not exactly.” A waitress came over, heavy and older and wearing a lot of perfume and fatigue, and took four orders for the same thing – cheeseburger deluxe platters and Cokes.

St John looked at Johnny Lawrence. “Cheeseburger? You always get the chicken parm.”

Johhny Lawrence shrugged, broad shoulders hefting a large barrel chest. “I’m on a diet.”

Anthony says, “Shut up. My ma heard from her sister who heard from Fingers’ cousin who got an email from Fingers. He said he’s ok, don’t worry about him, he’s takin some time off ‘south of Texas.’”

“‘South of Texas’? What the fuck is south of Texas? There’s nothin down there but Mexico.”

Anthony said nothing and nodded. “Exactly.”

“Mexico?”

“Maybe. Technically all of South America is south of Texas. And 60 grand goes a LONG way down there.”

Johnny Lawrence says, “Whoa..that’s a lotta Corona.”

“But eventually,” says Nuckles, “the money is gonna run out. What then?”

The waitress came over with a plate full of cups of cole slaw and sliced pickles. There were five of each. Nuckles says, “Va bene. Could we have an extra place setting?” The waitress shrugged and took out a rolled napkin stiffened by the fork, spoon, and knife it wrapped, from her apron and dropped it on the table next to the plate of cole slaw and pickles.

Anthony said, “You’re expecting someone else?”

“We’ll make a plate for Fingers, in his memory. The poor bastard’s days are numbered but at least he’s on a beach.”

Three men sit in a small booth in a big diner on a busy corner in Brooklyn.

It’s noisy, because the diner has terrible acoustics, but busy, because the food is good and the prices are reasonable. But the diner is old, and although everything is working today, the decor and equipment is oddly stuck between “needing to be replaced” and “so old it’s cool and vintage.”

It still exists because the owner of the diner owns the whole building. The rent from the nine apartments in the three floors above meet the building’s overhead, and the owner isn’t a greedy man, and he’s been friends with the residents for decades.

Even now, the owner of the building, wearing a cook’s apron and glasses that need to be cleaned, joins the other three men at the booth. He smells like a twenty-four hour kitchen.

All of them are at least in their sixties, but look a lot older. They have the faces of the retired, people with little to do and less to look forward to (although each of them would argue that.)

The cook, Joseph, greets the others with a simple nod and says, “Boys.” He looks at their plates and takes mental notes about which meals were finished and which weren’t. “Ralph, what was wrong with the eggplant?”

Ralph shrugs. “It was undercooked. Still tasted like a vegetable, you know? And too much oregano.”

Joseph shakes his head. “I told the kid one tablespoon of chopped oregano..pretty sure he put in a cup. Undercooking it, though, that was me. I was rushing and lost track of time. Thought it was in longer than it was. Sorry about that.”

Ralph smiles. “No worries. I ate most of it. Was still good.”

Joseph looks at the others. “Mikey. Vince. I can’t even tell what you guys ate, you’re plates are so clean. Good for  you.”

“Your burgers never disappoint, Joe.”

A young waitress brings over a plate and a glass of water places it before the owner. Tuna on toasted multigrain with plenty of lettuce above and below. “Here ya go, Joe,” she smiles.

“Thanks, Ro.”

Mikey watches her leave. “She’s cute. She’s new?”

“She’s my granddaughter, you idiot.”

Mikey raises his eyebrows. “Tom’s kid?”

Joseph talks between mouthfuls of sandwich. “You’re such a dope. That’s Rose Marie, Marie’s youngest.”

Vince puts down his coffee. “Marie’s youngest? I thought she was in, like 5th grade..”

“She was. Ten years ago. Now she’s in college and works part time here.”

Mike: “Joe, why do you put so much lettuce on that? It’s mostly lettuce with a side of tuna.”

“Shows how much you know,” Joseph says. “Lettuce between the tuna and the bread keeps the bread from turning mushy. Besides, I like it with lettuce.”

“Yeah, but that’s too much..”

“Too much for you, maybe. Not too much for the morning crowd that buys my lunch packs. I always get compliments about how the bread is still..you know..bread. Not mushy.”

Mike nodded, getting it. He looked at the others, who were just looking around.

Mike, never afraid to say what’s on his mind: “Joe, we were wondering if there was something you needed to tell us.”

Joseph keeps chewing, nods his head. Puts down the sandwich and drinks a little water. “You saw the ‘For Sale’ sign in the window.”

“Yeah, we saw the sign. Kind of hard to miss. It’s the size of a billboard.” Vince looked hurt. Now that Mike broke the ice, the others were paying attention.

Ralph says, “First of all, why didn’t you tell us you were even thinking of it? You just woke up and said, ‘Hey, ya know what? I’m gonna sell the diner.'”

“I’m not just selling the diner. The whole building.”

Ralph and Vince freeze. Mike says, “What the f-”

Joseph raises his hand. “Easy, Mikey. I’m not kicking you guys out. The contract will make sure your apartments will still be at the rent your paying for 10 years or you die off, whatever comes first.”

“What am I gonna do ten years from now?” asks Vince.

Joseph looks up. “You should be so lucky. I hope that’s a concern for you 10 years from now.”

Ralph, struggling to be the voice of reason. “All right, everyone relax. Joe, what brought this on? Why now?”

Joseph laughed. “Why now? I’m 68. I’ve been living here all my life. I’ve been running this diner for 40 years. Why now?” He took a sip of water. “I’ve outlived my wife. My kids live too far to visit, and when they do, they can’t stand Brooklyn. When you live on 20 acres with trees and big night skies and a river, it’s kind of hard to sleep on Flatbush Ave.”

Mike says, “I couldn’t sleep in a place like that. Too quiet. All those trees..it’s just creepy.”

“Says the old guy eyeing the 20 year old,” Joseph says.

“What? She looks older.”

“Joe,” says Vince, “Where are you gonna go? Kansas?”

Joseph nods. “At first I’m going to move in with Jon and Lucy, in Jersey. They have plenty of room, Lucy is away a lot, Jon says he’d love to have me. But I’ll probably buy a place near the Kansas spaceport. Marie lives there, and I’ll be able to hop up to the moon a few times a year to see Tom.”

The diner was starting to quiet down as the lunch crowd thinned. No one spoke and Joseph finished his sandwich.

Then Vince says, “I was thinking of moving, too.”

Mike: “What?! You, too?” He immediately looks at Joseph. “Did you know?” Mike looks back at Vince. “I thought you were worried about 10 years from now.”

Vince says, “I am. But my daughter keeps asking when I’m going to move out of the city. Live a little closer. She keeps saying ‘Dad, you know your grandkids aren’t getting any younger.'” Vince shrugs a little. “Maybe nows a good time.”

Joseph takes off his glasses and cleans them carefully. The group is silent, holding fast to something they can see and feel slipping away.

You’re standing in ice cold and stiff and shiny dress shoes on well-groomed grass under a bright morning sun in an uncomfortable suit listening to a preacher you don’t know talk about someone you loved dearly. You are sweating and cold at the same time.

The quiet solemnity surrounding you is at sharp odds with the chaos in your head. It’s the opposite of a hurricane – the calm warm eye of the storm surrounds you, but behind your eyes rages a cat 5, hurling chunks of hail and ripping down signposts you thought would guide you and washing away beliefs you held dear. All you loved and the life you were building, the life you had already built, is nothing but a vast wasteland stretching out to the horizon, littered with jagged storm debris.

Behind you lay a rich life of achievements and children and grandchildren, now stripped of color and flavor and warmth, now just a crumbling fading mocking effort at meaning.

Ahead is a terrifying unavoidable no man’s land of grief and solitude and colorless icy despair.

You are surrounded by contrasts and contradictions, and the struggle to keep contained your screams and fears is resulting in clenched fists and curled toes inside those new shoes. Your feet are blocks of ice, and the ill-fitting suit ripples in the breeze, fluttering against your own cold hard skin.

Your thoughts are nothing but questions. Now what? How could this be? When will I wake up? When will SHE wake up? Where is she now?

Now what.

Everything has been made hollow and hard and cold. You look around at the others, people dressed in black, and you catch some looking at you. You look back, questioning them wordlessly – did you know? Did YOU know? Did anyone know that she was the meaning of life? That she would take it with her when she died? That meaning poured forth from her like warm spring water? Was I a fool to not see it coming?

Then you realize no one is talking, and instead of some looking at you, they all are. You look back at each of them.

What now?

Your eyes circle back to the preacher and he gestures toward a shovel. Holy God, you think – they want me to bury her.

You don’t understand the why of anything. What’s the point? The bright sunlight and green grass and morning breeze once meant the promise of a beautiful day, but now you see those bright promises were dark and empty, like shiny sweet candy distracting you from the inevitable passage of time. Like cold space, all is void.

You walk forward and pick up a shovel. It has no weight. The dirt you pick up with the shovel has no weight. The sound made by the dirt landing atop the coffin is hollow, like a cheap imitation of what dirt piling up on a coffin should sound like.

Someone gently takes the shovel from your hand, and for a moment her hand touches yours and it’s warm, like the sun itself is touching you. You look up into the eyes of your wife, but see instead the face of your daughter. You feel a crack in the ice encasing your heart, and something warm emerges, slowly, carefully. Hope, brought forth, small, like an atom, but hot, like the sun, and even though the world is now pointless and frozen, a tiny part inside you begins to melt, and you begin to cry, staring into the face of your daughter and the eyes of your wife.

You’re standing in the airlock listening to a diminishing hiss. The needle on the pressure meter is still in the green, but not for long. Soon, in minutes, it’ll cross that threshold between green and yellow, and you wonder if you’ll feel uncomfortable. Not worried. Just curious.

You’re getting cooler, too. It isn’t cold yet, but you figure you’ll be frozen solid by the time it’s uncomfortably cold.

The airlock isn’t large, but big enough for three or four people in puffy EVA suits, so it feels luxuriously spacious now, alone, wearing nothing but jeans and a t-shirt. About the size of your first apartment with her. That was a crazy, busy, time for both of you. Part time jobs, full time school, friends everywhere. Sleep was for the old and the dead. That was four years of work, study, sex, fast food, trips home, weekends in orbit, internships on the moon. Four years out of eighty, four great years, but not even the best years.

You push yourself off the back wall and float toward the outer door, then grab the overhead rung with ancient wrinkled hands and hold steady before the small window. Your nose bumps the glass – triple paned and thick – but you’re still shocked at how cold it is. You realize you’ve never touched with your bare hands any part of the outer hull, and you wonder if you’ll still be conscious when the door slides open. It’d be cool to lay your old hands on the exterior of the station, if only for a moment.

You’re looking through the window at the stars, at the millions you can see, wondering about the billions you can’t, sugar sprinkled on black velvet, but more, and denser, and blacker and alive. You crane your neck and try to look in all directions at once, but the glass is cold and you’re feeling colder, and your neck starts to cramp, so you back away and stand straight and breathe and close your eyes.

And you think of the life you’re leaving behind. You can see in your mind the moment you met her, how it seems like a million life chapters ago and how it seems like it was yesterday. You can see her smile and hear her call your name, and you can see her holding the babies – first one, then she’s a little older and holding another, then she’s older and she’s holding another. And you can see the evolution of your children from babies to people, responsible and with babies of their own. And somehow sixty trips around the sun have gone by since that first apartment, and together you lived and thrived and, finally after a lucky and earned full life, she died.

You’re standing in the airlock listening to the diminishing hiss, hoping you’ll be with her soon. Hoping the children will understand. They should be getting the queued message soon, and you hope you wrote enough. You hope they can explain the importance of each moment to their own children, and you hope they live each day with the gratitude you are feeling at this moment.

It wasn’t always easy, but by embracing the inevitability of the end, you found peace and patience and joy every day.

Your eyes are closed, and the hissing stops, and you can feel the airlock door slide open, and a warm gentle hand rests on your arm, pulling you out into the sunlight, and you know you’ll never stop feeling grateful.

You’ve jumped from a cliff, and now gravity has you.

It was intentional but you didn’t understand the consequences. You looked out from the lip at a beautiful sunrise and blue sky and a distant horizon and thought, “I want to be a part of that. I can be a part of that.”

So you backed away from the edge, about ten steps, and dug in your feet, and then sprinted, hearing an imaginary gun declaring the start of the race.

Except you aren’t racing. You’re alone.

And you ran flat out and leapt, arms out, reaching, and for a moment you arched up, and you smiled, grinned, a maniacal joy like rapture filling you.

Then you leveled off. Then you started dropping. Then you realized there was no turning back, nothing to grab hold of.

Now you see details on the ground getting bigger, what was a bush is now a tree, small rocks are boulders.

You are terrified by the inevitable, and your only hope is that you don’t survive, because you know the end will be instant but surviving will be long and painful and a burden to all who love you.

“I’m sorr-“

Full Burn, Soft Landing is now available! You can get it for free on Wattpad or only 99¢ on Amazon!

Or you can download a free PDF from here.

Amazon discourages authors from freely distributing their work unless you enroll in their KDP program – but if you do that, the story cannot be available anywhere else. So, not ready to do that yet.

It’s a short story about a space freighter pilot and her husband. Comments welcome!

All epics start somewhere.