a title-less short story

Two men met on the road there headed different directions. They sat apart from each other, both more interested in his own time off the road and away from the wet, fallen leaves, and the wind that broke against the door and crept in the seals, than any other man who has not the same power to bless as coffee poured from a vending machine. The cold was outside and the coffee was hot inside. It warmed the hands and fingertips through the paper cup as it did the mouth and the lips and the belly.

Wind takes from you to the point of the soul. It will take your breath, immediate memory, flesh and bone, and leave a naked soul. Warmth is redressing. This need to redress is perhaps one of the only reasons for thinking there is such a thing as the soul.

A weatherman carried on from a TV screen overhead. The broadcast predicted more wind and more rain, not here but there, and not there, but just there, though it was not just there but here, and here seemed to be everywhere. Thunderstorms are moving into here, and winds are up to so many miles an hour.

Coffee is hot, and chocolate creeps into the stomach a healer. And both men held their cups in the same loose grip, and both took everything around them with a slow, deliberate breathing.

The weather went on predictably. The trees swayed and mourned and lost their leaves to the wind and the wet road, and passing trucks tore even more from them. The pines bent and sagged at their tops, unable to shed their clothes to relieve the strain. And the sky stirred restlessly, and birds lay low in the grasses and did not fly from the timbers. The air filled with leaves one moment, and they all stuck to the ground, or on cars, where they landed, and then they were gone. And then the rain came harder in passing sheets, and the pines whined and bowed, but the others leaned, relieved. And the earth kept the water for them, and the shed was fine, and the winter would pass.

The men crinkled empty wrappers in their hands. One man rose to feed himself again. The coffee was cooling, but the warmth had been got, and there would be more to be got later. But a man got himself another cup; with this wind there would soon be no more leaves or nothing to stop it, and all a man would have was his body, and all for protection was warmth. So he would drink another before he made him face it.

And then a man was no longer hungry or cold, and this shelter was all used up against the soggy freeze, and a man had a truck and a road. So he got him up, and he stayed at the door. The wind beat against it, and it rattled in its setting. He watched it push against the trees, and the rain, in waves, against the woods and the road and the window and his truck. He was warm, and the cold waited out the door. He sighed. And it was met by an affirming groan from the other man, close to “Yep,” but cut off, and so closer to “Yet.”