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Illustrated StoryStories · Issue 00

Iris's hand on the warm chrome

Text and illustrations produced by the pipeline

ImaReadFolio 02 — 09

The door chime was the same as every diner she'd ever walked into — a small brass bell, a single clear note that didn't care who you were or where you'd come from. Iris pushed the door open and stepped onto black-and-white tile, and somewhere behind her the door whispered shut on a sound like wind through a wheat field, and that was the last familiar thing for a while.

Inside, a long chrome counter ran the length of the room, its polished surface catching the light from a window that should not have existed. Outside the window, Saturn hung so close that you could see the texture of its rings — the bands of ice and stone lit from above, throwing pale slanted light into the diner like a permanent late afternoon. Iris put her hand on the counter and the metal was warm under her fingers, the way a teakettle is warm on the stove. The counter did not move. Saturn did not move. The light through the window was the same light, the same angle, every time she looked up.

A sign hung above the back wall in pink and mint neon: polly's — open always. Below it, a smaller board listed the day's offerings in cursive: pie, three ways; coffee, bottomless; chili, red or white; milkshakes, any flavor we can guess; and at the very bottom, in letters smaller and steadier than the rest, a single rule — please do not ask another guest what year they are from.

Behind the counter stood a woman with white hair pulled into a high bun, an apron the color of a schoolhouse, and the calm face of someone who had been poured from the same mold for a long time. "Sit anywhere you like, honey," she said. "First cup's on the house."

Iris chose a stool near the middle of the counter. The vinyl was red, cracked in places, and someone had stitched a small tear with yellow thread. The red stool, the chrome rail at her feet, the napkin dispenser shaped like a rocket — everything was the kind of object she recognized from her own years, and yet she could not place the year itself. The brand of the cigarette machine in the corner was one she had never seen advertised in any magazine. The clock above the kitchen door had thirteen numbers.

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ImaReadFolio 03 — 09

ImaReadFolio 04 — 09

ImaReadFolio 05 — 09

The clock above the kitchen ticked over a number. Iris did not see which one. The light through the window shifted by a single degree, the way sunlight shifts on a porch between afternoon and the long gold of evening. The neon menu board hummed. The man with the satchel closed his notebook and put the pencil behind his ear and said, "I think I'll have a milkshake."

"Chocolate?" the woman said.

"Whatever you would most enjoy making," he said.

The woman went to work behind the counter with the unhurried motions of a person who had made ten thousand milkshakes and was still finding small refinements. Iris watched her pour milk into a metal canister, add syrup, set the canister in the cradle of a mixer the size of a small car. The mixer whirred. Outside, Saturn's rings caught a bit of broken light from somewhere and threw it back as a thin pale line across the chrome. The diner hummed with it.

ImaReadFolio 06 — 09

"In my time," the old woman said. She did not say what her time was. She did not need to. The young man nodded. The man with the satchel nodded. Iris nodded, even though she did not understand, even though her year was 1953 and her year had not yet had a time to be forgotten in. There was something about the way the old woman said "in my time" that made the words feel like a small soft room you could step into if you needed to, and Iris thought that maybe in a hundred years people would say the same thing about hers, and that this was the kind of thought that could break you if you held it wrong.

The man with the satchel cleared his throat. "I would like to tell a story," he said, "if no one minds."

"No one minds," said the woman behind the counter, before anyone could speak.

He told them about a place he had been, a long time ago, before he came here, a place of wet meadows and small purple flowers and a river that ran so slowly you could walk beside it all afternoon and still see the same bend in the bank. He told them about a daughter, or maybe a niece, who had laughed at the way he sketched, who had said, "Papa, the cow has too many legs." He told them he had been carrying her letter in the satchel for a long time, and that the letter was no longer readable, but that he liked the weight of it in the bag.

No one asked what year. No one asked what place. Iris found that her coffee was hot, and that she had not tasted it yet, and that it was good — strong, and slightly burnt, the way coffee is when it has been on the burner for an hour and no one has minded.

The young man finished his pie. He set the fork down with the care of a man putting down a small animal he had been protecting. He said, "I think I will be going soon. I have somewhere I need to be."

ImaReadFolio 07 — 09

"Come back anytime," said the woman.

"I will," he said. "I might not, but I will."

The door closed behind him. The bell chimed. Saturn's rings shifted a half-shade of light. The old woman sipped her tea. The man with the satchel opened his notebook again and began, very slowly, to draw the young man's empty stool.

ImaReadFolio 08 — 09

She did not say what year.

The man with the satchel closed his notebook. The old woman finished her tea and stood, slowly, with the cane. She left a small glass bead on the table — blue, the color of a sky she had maybe once lived under — and walked to the door. Before she went out, she paused at Iris's stool.

"You are 1953," the old woman said. It was not a question.

"Yes," Iris said.

"I was a girl in 1953," the old woman said. "I had a name then. I have another name now. I remember the year because of the way the light came through my kitchen window on a Tuesday in October."

Iris did not ask what name. She did not ask what year. She said, "I will remember that, too."

"Good," said the old woman. "That is all anyone can ask."

She went out the door. The bell chimed. The light through the window changed again, the same single degree.

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ImaReadFolio 09 — 09

Iris finished her coffee. She folded the ticket and put it in her pocket. She stood, and the stool made the small sound stools make, and she went to the door, and she put her hand on the brass handle, and she turned to the woman behind the counter.

"Thank you, Polly," she said.

"You're welcome, honey," said Polly. "Come back whenever."

"What if I forget how I got here?" Iris said.

"Then you'll find another way," said Polly, and went to polish the chrome with a cloth that smelled faintly of lemon. "We always do."

The someone else was already three stools down, an older man with muttonchops and a brown wool coat that had been folded many times in many trunks. He had a leather satchel open on the counter and he was sketching something in a small notebook with a pencil so worn it had been sharpened down to a thumb's length. He did not look up when the cup was set in front of him, but he said, "Thank you, ma'am," in a voice that sounded as though it had been trained on a different ocean. Iris thought: a man from a place where people still said ma'am as a kind of music. She did not ask what year.

She looked at her own cup. There was a small ticket clipped to the saucer, the kind that came off a roll, and on it in neat typewriter print: IRIS — 1953 — COFFEE, NO CREAM. She stared at it for a long time. She had not told the woman her name. She had not told the woman her year. She had not, in fact, told anyone her year in a long time, because she had forgotten it, and now here it was on a slip of paper the size of a thumbnail, and it was correct.

"It's not a guess," the woman said from somewhere behind her. "It's a stamp. We get what we get."

The man with the satchel turned a page in his notebook. He was drawing Saturn from memory, you could tell by the way his hand moved — short, sure lines of someone who had looked at a thing very carefully once and was now trying to be honest about what he remembered. Iris noticed a small flower pressed between two pages: a purple bloom, papery, the kind that grew in wet meadows. She thought: he has been somewhere that was not Saturn, and was once a place he loved.

Outside, a streak of light crossed the rings — a small silver craft, no larger than a city bus, sliding between two of the bands with the ease of a hand slipping into a glove. Iris held her breath. The man with the satchel did not. He lifted his cup, took a sip, and said, to no one in particular, "They are very courteous."

"Who?" Iris asked.

"The travelers," he said. "I have been here three days. I have not seen one bump."

"You've been here three days?"

"I have not asked you what year," he said, with a small courteous smile. "And you have not asked me. We are even."

A second guest came in through the door with the same brass chime. He was young — younger than Iris, younger than the man with the satchel, younger in a way that Iris had no word for — and he was wearing a silver suit that fit him like a second skin, and his eyes were the color of a sky before a storm. He slid onto the stool at the far end of the counter and said, "Coffee, black, and whatever pie you would most recommend to someone who has not eaten in six years." His voice was tired in a way that did not match his face.

"Six years?" Iris said, before she could catch herself.

"Long story," the young man said. "Involves a small ship and a misunderstanding about a parking orbit." He put his hands flat on the chrome and looked at them. "Also, I think I am lost."

"Most of us are, honey," said the woman from behind the counter, and set down a slice of cherry pie with a fork and a paper napkin printed with little rockets. The ticket on the pie read: GUEST — YEAR WITHHELD — PIE, CHERRY, ONE FORK.

Iris laughed. She did not know why. She was not a person who laughed easily in diners, but there was something about the way the young man's shoulders came down when the pie was in front of him, the way his whole body seemed to recognize the fork as an old friend, that made her laugh. The man with the satchel laughed too, a soft short sound like a cough that had decided to be polite.

"Eat your pie," the woman said to the young man. "We have all the time that is."

The pie was, in fact, cherry. The fork was, in fact, one. The napkin was, in fact, printed with little rockets. The young man took a bite, and closed his eyes, and Iris saw that his lashes were wet, and she looked away because looking at a man crying into his cherry pie in a diner by Saturn was not the kind of thing you should be caught at, even in a place where no one asked what year you were from.