Work Text:
Lillium works in a coffee shop. He has worked in this particular coffee shop for what feels like a rather long period of time, and if he were to think briefly about his past, he would have some difficulty recalling a time when he has not worked here in this coffee shop. The days are slow, each minute nested within the next. The tasks he is given are repetitive, eternally standing in front of the coffee machine, holding metal canisters beneath the flow of espresso that pours from it, mixing in some milk and pouring it into a paper cup before calling out whatever name has been hastily scrawled on it. There are hardly ever more than three people in the coffee shop at a time, but he is used to calling out names when the drinks are finished, so he never considers simply not doing this. The actions themselves become rhythmic, each reach of his arm, press of a button becoming beats that add a deep base to the bland music the coffee shop always has playing in the background. He never pays much attention to the music, knowing that if he were to actually be aware of the eternally looping tracks that he might go insane. Still, they have a nice rhythm, and he flows to it until he himself becomes a fixture of the coffee shop just as much as the counter tops or the tables of the coffee machines.
In his spare time, he entertains himself by trying out new combinations of drinks, stirring foamed milk and caramel and strawberry syrup and decaffeinated coffee together only to pour it down the sink after his first sip. He’s never actually been scolded for wasting ingredients like this, if any of his coworkers have even noticed that he does this then they have never commented on it, but he is mindful that he should perhaps not be so wasteful. He does not prepare these drinks as often as he would like. Instead, Lillium tends to wipe the counters down, restack the paper cups, watch the customers. The customers who bother to actually stay for a bit in the rather uncomfortable but aesthetically fashionable seating area are almost all regulars. Most customers do not linger after receiving their drinks.
The regulars never speak to him. He does not particularly expect them to. He, after all, is only the barista and never handles any of the direct customer interactions like the cashier does. He recognizes the regulars not by their faces, but by their general shapes and colors just as one may recognize a flower from the corner of their eyes even if they cannot recall its name when it is placed in front of them. Flowers are nice. Lillium does not particularly know anything about flowers. He imagines they would get annoying to be around after a while with all the pollen floating in the air.
The woman in the yellow turtleneck always orders a macchiato with a shot of vanilla. She sits at the table closest to where Lillium works but always with her back facing him. An old man with glasses orders tea with milk which Lillium always rolls his eyes at while he prepares. This man sits beside the window and watches the street even though people rarely pass by. A boy around Lillium’s age with black hair always orders a monstrosity with cream and strawberry syrup and only the smallest amount of coffee that makes Lillium’s molars ache with the sweetness of it all each time he’s forced to make it. The boy sits in the corner near the back exit, always drawing something in his sketchbook. Other regulars come and go, leaving behind enough of an impression to be recalled but not remembered.
The layout of the coffee shop is rather simple. The bar counter is positioned relatively close to the front door, taking up the majority of that particular wall. Behind the counter is dedicated to syrup bottles and the espresso machine and so many metal measuring cups that pile up worryingly quickly in the sink despite the relative lack of customers. The rest of the coffee shop houses tables and seats for anyone who enjoys oddly shaped plastic chairs and the same song looping every five minutes. There’s no actual menu anywhere to be found in the coffee shop. Lillium wonders about this in the disinterested way one might wonder whether or not they had actually written down a grocery list or if they had just misplaced it. He considers how any of the customers actually know what drink to order if there is no menu.
The boy in the corner stands up. His cup is empty though some of the cream clings to the interior of the clear, plastic sides. He leaves his sketchbook behind when he approaches the counter.
“I want to try something new,” he says. The cashier nods, but she exudes a deep lack of interest. She would hardly care if he had said that he wanted to eat a rubber tire, let alone that he wants to order a slightly different drink from usual. He looks up at the wall behind the cashier’s head. He stares for a moment, frowns, turns his gaze back to her. “I’ll have a mocha frappuccino, please, with cookie crumble on top.”
She passes the order on to Lillium even though he had already heard the conversation from where he stood off to the side. Luckily, the frappuccino machine has already been cleaned from its last use. He squirts whipped cream over it and reaches beneath the counter to grab the rarely used cookie crumbs. He is not certain how old these crumbs are and whether is might be wrong to give a regular potentially expired and certainly stale cookies. He shrugs these thoughts off and dumps some cookies on the whipped cream before popping the lid on. He calls out the name written on the cup, forgetting it as soon as it has passed his lips. When the boy doesn’t immediately come to retrieve it, Lillium sets the drink on the counter and turns to begin cleaning the frappuccino machine. When he next glances toward the counter, the drink is no longer there, and the boy along with his sketchbook are nowhere to be seen anywhere in the coffee shop. The woman in the yellow turtleneck and the old man with the glasses are still in their respective places.
Lillium stays late to close shop and arrives early to open it the next day, the time in between these two events slipping away into ambiguity. He flips the light switch and begins powering on all the machines. He makes a sample cup of coffee to make sure that everything is in working order and gives it to himself as a treat for being subjected to this ungodly early hour. The shop was already swept before closing last night, but he pulls out the broom and sweeps again for lack of anything else to do while he waits for the customers and the cashier to show up.
He messes around with the cash register for a bit. They’re low on coins. Most people don’t pay with cash anymore though, so they probably won’t have to worry about not having the money to give change. Lillium sinks to the floor, careful to keep his hands on his knees. He doesn’t feel like having to wash his hands again if he were to accidentally touch the ground. His back is pressed against the cabinet below the cash register, the small metal handle digging into the muscle just to the left of his spine. He tips his head back, letting it knock against the lip of the counter. Across from him there is a menu listing out all their drinks with the accompanying prices inscribed beside them. Strange. Of course, there’s always been a menu. How else would the customers know what drinks to order? He simply must not have noticed it before.
The bell above the door rings, and Lillium twists around to see whether it’s a customer who he’ll have to interact with. It’s only the cashier, so he slides back down to the floor. She circles around the counter and slips an apron over her neck, tying it around her waist. He’s not sure why she bothers with the apron. She never prepares any of the drinks. Neither of them greets the other. Both stand distant and still while waiting for the first customer to arrive that will allow them to enter into their routine. Lillium doesn’t know the name of the cashier even as he realizes that he’s never seen any other cashier working at this coffee shop. Her appearance his loud and distinct with her hair partially shaved and partially dyed a fading electric blue. It is just as eye catching as it is ultimately forgettable. He doubts that he would recognize her if they were to pass one another on the street. It’s boring to simply wait. He closes his eyes and breathes in slowly.
Lillium works in a flower shop. More accurately, he owns a flower shop tucked away between a laundromat and a boba shop. He employs a grand total of two people: him and himself. It had never been a particular dream of Lillium’s to be the owner of a flower shop, but he had no such ambitions for any other field of work, so he finds himself to be content with the running of his little store. The space is cramped, filled almost to the brim with buckets upon buckets of flowers. Overhead, baskets with vines spill down. There is only enough space to slowly shuffle between the rows and water the various bundles. The only haven from the mass of flowers was the space Lillium was currently occupying behind the counter. To be fair, it was not entirely clear of clutter—there are several clay pots stacked behind him that need to be put somewhere more permanent before he trips and breaks them—but there is relatively more space to not be crushed in on all sides by flowers.
Not too many people venture into his shop and most who do leave quickly after inquiring about the starting price for a bouquet. Still, he sees enough of a monetary boost during Valentine’s Day and the summer with weddings that it lets him get by comfortably the rest of the year. With no orders currently waiting to be filled, he exits from behind the counter and begins picking his way through the flowers, pulling out small bundles of the ones that catch his eye. He stops in front of the section dedicated to the irises.
So neatly bundled together are they. Black and velveteen purple and crisp blue and lilac. Some with the edges of their petals neatly crimped while others are perfectly smooth. Yellow and white bleed out from the centers and stain the petal, replacing the deep colors that were there previously. All shaped like small thrones upon which a tiny, imagined king may seat himself. The irises tend to not be a very popular choice for bouquets. They are not a suitable fit for the bouquet he is envisioning. Lillium moves past them to pick a bundle of baby’s breath.
He returns to the counter and unwinds the rubber bands tied around the bases of each bundle. He retrieves a vase from one of the shelves behind him and begins pulling flowers out from the pile amassed upon the countertop to arrange carefully in the vase. It is elegant in an understated way when finished. He cuts a piece of white ribbon and ties it neatly around the neck of the vase. He weighs it all in his hands for a moment before bringing it over to the front window display. He pushes aside a basket of daffodils—age beginning to wilt and curl the edges of their petals—to make room for the new bouquet.
Behind him, the bell above to door chimes to signal a customer entering the shop. He doesn’t bother turning around to greet them. If they need help with something, then they can always come to him. Lillium shifts the bouquet slightly and steps out of the shop to inspect how his window display look from the outside. It looks pretty but in an understated way that leans more toward home décor rather than extravagant wedding ceremonies. Contented, he enters back into his shop and settles himself on the stool behind the counter. The lone customer has not robbed him blind or knocked anything over in the minute that Lillium had stepped out. With nothing else to keep himself occupied unless he wants to start fashioning another bouquet, Lillium begins tying the flower bundles back up though his eyes continue to flicker over to where the customer is carefully shuffling between the rows, pausing every once in a while to feel a petal between his fingers or to bring his face to a bundle and breathe in deeply.
The customer appears to be around Lillium’s age. His back is to Lillium, but he carries with him a small backpack and a tattered sketchbook clutched to his waist. The customer pulls a lily from its bundle and turns to glance at Lillium as he draws its scent into himself. The customers eyes are deep and black, and Lillium is struck with a certainty that they have known one another before.
“How much are the flower bundles?” he asks, voice raised just enough to carry across the distance between them.
“The lilies are twelve dollars per bundle.”
“And individually?”
“I don’t sell them individually.”
The customer nods and picks out one of the bundles from the bucket, tucking the single flower he had been holding back in among the cluster. He weaves through the rows, unwinding the path he had walked before, and approaches the counter to place the bundle upon it.
“Do you want these wrapped?” Lillium asks, already reaching for a ribbon from beneath the counter.
“No, thank you. Just like this is fine.”
Lillium straightens himself back up. Looks at the customer. “We’ve met before,” Lillium says. “You’re a regular at the coffee shop that I work at.”
“I think you might have me confused with someone else.”
Lillium blinks. He has never worked at a coffee shop before. Before owning this flower shop, he worked at, well, he can’t recall for certain, but he has never worked at a coffee shop before. He would remember if he had. He would remember such a detail about himself if it actually had occurred. He has not met this customer before. He certainly never met him at a coffee shop. A coffee shop that he has never worked at. Perhaps they had simply passed one another on the street. Lillium thinks that he has not been getting enough sleep lately.
What had he just been thinking?
The customer is watching him patiently. Right. He had asked if the customer wanted the flowers wrapped and was told no.
“That’ll be twelve dollars.”
“Do you take cash?”
“Cash is fine.”
The customer hands over a ten and a five. Lillium pops open the cash register, withdrawing three dollars to pass over to the customer.
“Would you like a copy of your receipt?”
“No, thank you.”
“Okay. Thank you for your purchase. Have a nice day.”
“And you. Thank you.”
The customer leaves and the bell chimes again.
Lillium grabs a pen from the corner of the counter and pulls the receipt book in front of himself, jotting down the transaction. Finished, he leans back on his stool and stares out into the empty shop. He is alone here, simply waiting for this day to end so that he may return tomorrow in a never-ending cycle. Just looping and looping and looping and looping and
Lillium is sitting on a park bench. More specifically, he is sitting on a park bench across from the building where he used to work. Where he had worked just this morning before summarily setting down his headset for good and quitting without a backward glance at his cramped, little cubicle. The building is looming and sleek in that wretched way of towering walls covered in windows that can be seen out of but not seen into. The blue sky is reflected within these windows, but it becomes darkened and distorted.
There is a sandwich shop in the lobby of the building. The sandwiches are lackluster, prepared en masse in the morning and saran wrapped so that by lunch time the bread has become soggy with tomato juice and whatever condiment they decided to use that particular day. It is usually mustard, the thick yellow paste squishing out and dripping down the edge as fingers pressed down upon the bread to take a bite from it. Lillium had stopped by the sandwich shop on his way out of the building to buy one final sandwich. He has no intention of every entering the building or that sandwich shop again.
He has no memory of actually doing these things. But he is sitting on a park bench across from the building with a sandwich from the sandwich shop on the bench beside him, so he assumes that this must be what occurred. He has been tired as of late. His actions have felt meaningless. A single discarded cog in an ever-turning machine. A machine designed to make more cogs to power more and more machines ad infinitum. There is no purpose here but to create more machines without heed to the cogs within them.
He pinches the crust between his fingers, crumbling it down into small grains that flake down onto the knees of his pants. The rest of the crumbs he throws out to the pigeons flocking around his feet. The take a simultaneous, startled flight before settling once more and pecking at the breadcrumbs littered now upon the cement path.
The day is warm, but this is obscured by the speckled shadows the leaves of the trees cast down upon him. The pigeons shift closer, and he tosses more crumbs at them. Tomorrow, he will need a new job. Perhaps he will simply walk back into the building across the street, settle himself into the cubicle and pick up his head seat, slotting easily back into the life he is meandering away from.
“Lillium!” His boyfriend is laughing, shoulders shaking as he attempts to contain all that joy within himself. He wraps his arms around his own waist, keeping himself steady even as his laughter is rocking him forward. His laughter turns into a snort halfway through, causing him to laugh all the harder. His cheeks are dimpled, his grin wide enough to show the slight over-bite that his is usually so self-conscious of. His eyes are barely visible with his nose crunched up so cutely, and tears sparkle at their edges. He looks so incredibly human as the golden mid-afternoon light streams through the window and highlights his edges, warming his black hair into a deep, rich brown. He uses the heel of his palm to wipe at the tear marks tracking across the planes of his cheeks, his laughter finally subsiding.
The cat in Lillium’s arms, composed mainly of long gray fur and an exquisitely pissed off expression, tries once more to wiggle out of his arms and to return to its previous task of shredding the leg of their armchair. Lillium holds it a bit more firmly, clenching his jaw tightly as the cat hisses its displeasure and tries to dig its claws deeper into the skin of his arm.
His boyfriend kneels down across from him and gently tickles the underside of the cat’s chin, all the while crooning meaningless platitudes at it. The cat yowls in response and tries to bite down on Lillium’s boyfriend’s finger.
“How did it get into our apartment again?” Lillium hunches his shoulders forward to give himself a bit more leverage to prevent the demon cat from slipping away.
His boyfriend glances up from where the cat his gnawing on his finger, seemingly unperturbed. “None of our windows are open, and I checked that the front door was locked. Maybe it was through the vents. Oh, like in that one Sherlock Holmes story!”
“You mean the one where the snake came through the vents to murder someone? Well?” Lillium shakes the cat. “Confess you meeskait. Did our neighbor send you through the vent to try and murder us?” The cat yowls again in a clear confession to the crime.
“But she seems so nice.” His boyfriend frowns. “She gave me some sugar cookies the other week.”
“They were obviously poisoned.”
With one great lurch, the cat abruptly frees itself from Lillium’s grip and darts away. They both scramble to their feet to pursue it, but any trace of the cat has disappeared save for a few clumps of its hair. Exhausted from this particular ordeal, his boyfriend flops back onto their bed and grabs Lillium’s wrist to drag him down as well. They lie side by side, shoulders pressed up against one another. Lillium wonders if his boyfriend can feel the press of the small, velvet box through the pocket of his pants. He has been carrying it with him everywhere for almost two months now, never finding quite the right time to officially pose the question.
“It really has to be the vents,” his boyfriend says. “Maybe the grate on one of the vents has come loose? It would also explain why your allergies have been acting up. If it’s been coming through the vents then its fur would get left behind and then whenever we turn the AC on, all the fur would get stirred up and blown around the apartment.”
“I still think that it can teleport.”
“That is definitely an equally plausible explanation.”
They turn their faces toward one another at the same time, so their noses just barely brush against each other. Lillium can see each pore on his forehead, can see the small scar at his hair line supposedly from a haircut gone horribly wrong. His eyelashes are long and dark, framing equally dark eyes. Lillium had once had a pillow thrown at him for comparing them to those of a camel. A second pillow had been thrown had him when he had hurried to assure his boyfriend that it was “a very beautiful camel.” He wonders if he should propose now. Here they are together, grinning and a bit shiny from the sweat. Cat fur clings to them like a second layer of clothes.
“What are you thinking about?” His boyfriend smiles and shifts closer, snagging the hem of Lillium’s shirt between his fingers.
Lillium is distracted from responding, caught in the sudden familiarity of the face in front of him. He has seen this face before, has known this face before. They met at the coffee shop where Lillium was the barista, and he was a regular. They met again at Lillium’s flower shop. What a strange thought to have. He has never worked at a coffee shop nor at a flower shop. He would certainly remember if he had. No. He works at, he works at, where does he work? Does he remember existing even the day before today?
His boyfriend frowns when Lillium does not respond. And isn’t that a strange thought? His boyfriend. His boyfriend. His boyfriend. What is his boyfriend’s name?
“Lillium?”
Lillium is standing outside of a convenience store, a small plastic bag held loosely between two of his fingers. He has presumably purchased whatever is inside the bag from the convenience store that he is now standing in front of, but he cannot remember doing any of these things even as he knows that they are things that must have happened because here he is standing in front of the convenience store holding a small plastic bag with some purchase in it. Right, of course.
The sky above him is an endless expanse of blue as though the world around him had been made in a hurry with no thought spared for what someone would see if they were to tilt their head ever so slightly up. Lillium cannot see the sun from where he stands, but his shadow stretches out before him. It lengthens with each minute that passes. At least, he imagines that it does. Any change occurs too incrementally for him to actually be able to perceive it.
He can’t remember, can’t know where he is supposed to go from here, so he continues to stand still in front of the convenience store, waiting for something to come and remind him of what sense exists within this world. There are no other people on the sidewalk. There are no cars in the street.
Someone exits the flower shop across the street holding a small bundle of lilies to his chest. He does not turn to face Lillium, but even here in profile does Lillium know him. He is the regular at the coffee shop, the customer at the flower shop, his boyfriend who laughed while covered in cat fur and to whom he was planning to propose. He disappears down the alley between the laundromat and an apartment building. Lillium drops the small plastic bag in his hand, only distantly aware of the harsh cracking noise it makes as it hits against the pavement.
Lillium runs.
The alley gets narrower as his runs through it, the brick walls curling inward and gripping his shoulder, tearing at his skin as he forces his way through. He runs blindly, tripping over the trash left discarded in the alley and paying to heed to the stinging burn radiating from his shoulders. It all ends abruptly, the alley opening up to the parking lot behind the convenience store, and Lillium’s mind tries to reconcile this, tries to fold the space of reality into a shape that could explain how he has ended up here after running through the alley across the street. It doesn’t matter.
The boy is in the middle of the parking lot, leaning his weight against a shopping cart that he slowly rolls forward then backward and forward again. There is no need to keep running now. The boy will wait for him.
Lillium walks slowly across the parking lot. He is rendered a silhouette against the descent of night and the lampposts that erratically flicker on out of the corner of his eye.
“Lillium,” the boy says, “Hey.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m Iris. We’ve met before.”
“What is this place? Where are we?”
“What do you mean?” Iris tries to maintain a face of confused innocence, but he casts his eyes down and leans himself heavier against the shopping cart to make something other than himself bear his weight. “Why should I tell you?”
“Because we’ve met before, but this is the first time I’ve ever seen you. Because I asked, and I want to know.”
Iris sits down on the park bench and gestures for Lillium to sit beside him. They face the building that Lillium has never set foot in before and where he used to work as a phone operator for some nameless insurance company.
“Death is painful,” Iris says, looking straight forward. “Well, it’s more the things that cause death that are painful. Death is, it’s nothing. If you die enough, there is something you come to know. It is your fault that you are dead. If only you could be better. More aware of your surroundings. Less trusting. Faster. Stronger. Then you wouldn’t die. Alternately, maybe it’s your fault that you’re alive. What are you doing wrong that you’re not even competent enough to die? Maybe if you just tried hard enough you could die for good. Maybe you would deserve it, and you should do it yourself rather than waiting for someone else to do it for you.” Iris looks at Lillium. It is more that he turns his face toward Lillium. Whatever it is that Iris is seeing, Lillium is certain that it is not his face. “You get used to it eventually.” Iris’s fingers curl over his knees. “Dying. Sometimes you’ll do it on purpose just to start the day again. Maybe you upset someone, so you kill yourself and try again. Maybe it was a good day, so your kill yourself at the end of it so that you can live that day as many times as you want.
“I died today. I have died today hundreds of times. There is no end to it. No matter what I try, I am always dead by the end of the day. The times that I don’t die, it’s always because you’re dead next to me, so I kill myself and try again. This was the only way that we could live. I created this world that we can live in together, and we never die. This was the only way for us to have a life.”
“Then it’s all fake. Everything here is fake.”
“You experience it. If you experience it, then doesn’t it become real?”
Lillium’s hands are shaking, but he feels still, calm. He is aware of each breath that he draws in and out, in and out, in and. “Who am I outside of this world? What was my life like?”
“I don’t know,” Iris says. “We’ve only known each other for a week. You’ve only known me for a week. At this point, I’ve known you for years. You never trusted me enough to really let me know you. Your name is Lillium White. You like cooking. You think I’m bad at it. You wear socks to bed. At times, I think you hate me.”
There are some breadcrumbs on the cement path, leftovers that the pigeons did not fully eat. “If you created this world, then how can you know that I’m Lillium?”
“What?”
“How can you know that I’m actually the Lillium that you know and not just a Lillium you created to fill this world just as much as all the buildings and trees around us now?”
“No, that’s not right. You’re real. You’re Lillium.”
“If I were Lillium, wouldn’t I know facts about myself? Wouldn’t I be more than just who you think I am?”
“You’re wrong, Lillium. You’re real. This is real.”
“Except that it isn’t. It’s all made up.” Lillium looks down at his hands. They are still shaking. He tries to make it stop, but they only shake harder. “Iris, you need to end this. You need to go back and try to survive today. Surviving today is the only way to keep living. This, what this is, this isn’t living.”
“I could just reset it all. I could make you forget that this conversation ever happened, and we could go back to this life. Did you like when we had an apartment together? Let’s do that again. I know this world isn’t perfect. It’s unsteady at the edges, but if I worked harder, I could perfect it. You would never notice that it was made up.”
“Iris,”
“Lillium, please. Please, I can’t. I don’t want to. I always die, Lillium. I always die. I can’t go back. It’s good here. We can stay here.”
Lillium grabs Iris’s hand. It is cold against his own, and chills prickle up his arm. It feels real. He squeezes Iris’s hand tightly within his own. He closes his eyes, exhales.