BEEN THINKIN’ ABOUT… BENDING MEMORY TIME. The white bread is nearly gone from the shelves, along with the cases of hamburger at the meat counter, the mounds of tomatoes and onions and peppers and avocados from the produce section, and the chili and pinto beans from the canned food aisle. Fortunately, I score a pint of milk from the cooler before that’s gone too. Impending weather does funny things to people. Bad timing: I’m just here to do my regular shopping, but yet, I should get some extra coffee. I can do without many things comfortably. Coffee is not one of them. Others score weed to calm down, to help with anxiety. My substance of choice is espresso and I like it by the quart. Beneath my affable exterior, I understand my particular brand of accomplishment is made through a fast-moving mind and a bitterly dark humor. Whatever it is that I am, I have no interest in numbing it, only exacerbating it.
The coffee aisle is surprisingly quiet and I stop by the big grind-your-own beans kiosk with something like a dozen choices. It’s easy to lean into snarky ingratitude. Too high prices, too much chaos. Just the same, there are momentary checks, reminders. We live in a country in which I can pretty much afford to buy pretty much anything I want, anytime. Convenience and choice have been the name of a 60-some-year American game we’ve been playing. Somewhere in that is a whispered prayer of gratitude. I review the coffee beans, looking for something oily and dark and roasted long until it’s good and bitter. I measure the beans and stop to look at the industrial grinder accompanying the kiosk. There’s a dusting of coffee grounds on the bag shelf. I resist the urge to stick my finger in the grounds.
Memory bends time. I’m so young. So young and sitting in the shopping cart in the Kroger’s store in Chillicothe, Illinois, the old store just a block from downtown (not the new store they built when I was in kindergarten). My mom stops in the coffee aisle, her sand-colored corduroy coat open, burgundy sweater, jeans, brown suede boots, dark brown hair curled. For reasons I cannot remember, we had a ritual — we would pass the coffee grinder and she would press her finger into the raw grounds, and then taste the coffee. It was an inside joke without a punchline. A moment shared. I don’t know why we did that (and we usually only had cheap instant coffee in the house), but it was a profound moment just the same, as real a moment as though it happened yesterday.
Midnight stars wheel westward. Rigel, Hyades, the Pleiades, even Uranus, creeps past the dark black walnut branches and the poplars and pear trees. Celestial magic happens in the midst of the mundane and something is happening here, on the eve of the storm. I had fallen asleep in front of an old Star Trek episode, one dealing with history of earth’s lost past, of supermen and chess moves. Now, the skies are dark, the air strangely crisp, strangely fecund, the smell of an old wood stove’s smoke on the air. Almost midnight and something has opened in the universe, significant, a place where times past exist simultaneously, stacked unassumingly next to the other. A ticking clock, an executioner’s blade, warmth of home, deals gone bad, gunshots in the dark, homes lost and lives found. Some theorize that all time exists side by side. Tonight, still waking up from the warmth of TV and couch, I feel that theory deep in my bones. All this has been here before, and will be again.
Early morning’s dark bitter African coffee is brewing. Beyond the coffee, the faint smell of bleach, and the lingering smell of fried chicken. My kitchen regularly smells like grandma and grandpa’s. I like it that way. The dogs are piled up in my bed. With cup of coffee in hand, I push two of them over to make room for myself. Is this all there is to life? Black puppy makes warm noises and begins to lick my face. So many years have been spent looking down the road, down to the next turn of the page, the next chapter, the next book. The black puppy has concluded her morning kisses. The other two dogs are curled next to me. I hold my cup of dark, bitter coffee. If this is — in all the universe — all there is and nothing more, then it’s really not so bad after all.
— Joshua Heston, editor-in-chief, StateoftheOzarks
© StateoftheOzarks 2026
