from Silk (Caitlin Kiernan)
“So why the hell did you stop in Birmingham,” the girl said, the girl with hair like cherries who had surprised her, not only by knowing what a Cubano was, but by actually knowing how to make one. Niki held the demitasse to her nostrils, breathed in the rich steam rising off the black, sweet coffee.
“You’d have to ask my car,” Niki said. “My car must have decided this looked like a good place to drop dead.”
The girl, whose name was Daria Parker, which made Niki think of Dorothy Parker, smiled slightly. She was taller than Niki, but hardly tall, and her face was too angular to be called pretty, much too handsome to ever be anything so simple or straightforward as pretty.
“Shit,” she said. “I sure as hell know I could find a better place to kick off.”
Niki sipped at her Cubano, the warmth spreading from her throat into her stomach, soothing away the road ache and exhaustion like a reward for still being alive. At least she’d found the coffeehouse, the only thing that had been open on this odd street. She’d turned the corner and at first the sight had been disorienting, almost disquieting, the gaslights and cobblestones and nothing open, planned anachronism, more of a Hollywood backlot than a street she’d have expected to find here.
“Okay, so why were you even driving through Birmingham?” Livid pink scars crisscrossed Daria’s forearms, telltale barista tattoos, marking the careless and inevitable contact of soft flesh and the espresso machine’s steam arm.
“Gee,” Niki said, setting her cup down on the bar. “I must have missed the quarantine signs.”
“The Chamber of Commerce keeps taking them down.” And this time, there wasn’t even the hint of a smile.
“Okay, I confess. I was just following directions,” and she dug a crumpled, brightly colored brochure from one pocket of her jacket, smoothed it out flat on the bar. “SEE-Ave Maria Grotto!” it commanded, in bold black typeface on glossy blue. “Little Jerusalem -AN INSPIRATION AND WONDERMENT.”
“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” Daria said, and she picked the brochure up off the bar.
Niki shrugged. “Nope. I’m afraid it’s the truth.”
She’d found the brochure at the welcome station just across the state line, had grabbed a big handful from the display rack by the restrooms and read through them while she’d sipped a styrofoam cup of coffee that had been free and had tasted like it. She had discarded brochures advertising places like DeSoto Caverns (“Underground Fairyland!”) and Moundville (“Secrets of a Vanished Past!”). Ave Maria Grotto had been at the very bottom, last chance at direction, and she’d been hooked by the story of the Benedictine monk who’d spent his life creating a scale model of the holy city from bits of stone and trash.
“You must be one weird lady, Niki Ky,” Daria said and tossed the brochure back onto the counter.
