A Short : Daily Cafe
iView Author: Anubha Yadav (Delhi, India)
Email: anubhay1 [at] gmail [dot] com
He calls himself Franz now. He changed his name ’cause nobody got his real name. They all left the ‘I’ orphaned. So when he got the mosquito bite fever he decided that his name would be Franz with no ‘I’.
Franz went to Daily Caf'©. The Caf'© had four tables arranged like a flower with one in the center where he sat daily. Daily Cafe only entertained people who came daily. Franz went their daily so he was welcome. He started his day with breakfast and coffee, had lunch alone at 1:00 p.m and precisely at 4:00p.m finished his coffee. He left for home at 6:00 like on any other work day.
For sometime Franz missed that unusual eagerness for his work. He knew that he was bored. He also knew that he was bored of being bored. Also, he was bored of knowing that even being bored of being bored did not change much.
One day as he sat in Daily Caf'©, bored he decided to chronicle his boredom. Excited, he entered the Cafe next morning with a pack of cigarettes and sat on his table with the Journal’s crisp white pages invitingly open, and a cigarette obliquely attached to his lips. Realizing that it was crucial to get the first line of his life right he resolved to sit beyond six for the Samsa moment. But at 5:13p.m he had to abandon his heroic attempt when he finished all his cigarettes. They got moist with his saliva and detached themselves from his lips.
As he waited, he thought, “How can my journal be as boring as my life? For God sake my life!” He looked around and saw the same people .He looked again at each table with abject disinterest.
Table 1: A man sat with a girl. He was telling her how he would disappear the next day as aliens from planet Earth were after him. The girl cried. They used 67 Daily Caf'© napkins and left.
Table 2: A 67 year old man sat alone with the whole year’s news papers. He read a month everyday. Just at times he would
shout, “Nothing changes. Give me a newspaper to read.”
Table 3: A woman sat with 7 cell phones laid out in a line. She picked each one and said the same thing-
Dial 1: If you are lonely and want to talk.
Dial 2: If you are lonely and want to sing your favorite song.
Dial 3: If you are lonely and want to share silence.
Dial 4: If you are lonely and want to be in love.
Dial 5: If you are lonely and want to confess.
Dial 6: If you are lonely and want to fight.
Dial 7: To talk to the operator.
He stared into his coffee, bored. He smiled. Franz had his samsa beginning.
A bored house fly had smashed itself to death on the pearl white sheets of his journal.
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boring.
Interesting.
seriously…..wtf?
I liked it, though I thought house fly was a rather obvious metaphor. The man’s insistence on precisely enumerating things around him was a nice touch.
U seem to ba a Kafka fan. And this one seems to be inspired from the diaries of Kafka. No other analogy will sound perfect when it comes to a writer not being able to write anything for a long time and that feeling mounting on and on and on…
I havent read much of Kafka but from this I can guage what you are going through…
Its superb!
Love it!
Keep writing!!!
Dewi
Actually as it is an ode to Kafka thus the usage….otherwise yes if one sees the domesticity metaphor housefly is a tad overused…..agree there
Asmit
Yep, this is an ode to Kafka….this was nt written as a writer’s block piece at all…..more so it is trying to critique the dailiness of ‘daily’ life…that the man does not wish to put his life truthfullu in his own life’s journal….And the fact that his life is about sitting in a cafe,eating and having coffee,even then he ceaselessly looks for more …..You surely add another interpretation to it! Thanks for noticing that it is Kafka ‘nisque’!
ay
Actually, I was thinking of the Kafka-Metamorphosis-fly connection. So the housefly is kind of an obvious clue, if you will.