Gray Silent King

“Do you want some of these?” asked the waitress, displaying a handful of little plastic coffee creamers.

“Yes, please,” I said.

“What for?” she demanded.

I had to think. “Because they make my coffee less bitter,” I said.

“OK,” she said, a little grudgingly, and dropped the lot on the table. Six of them; one more than I usually consume in a morning. Because another reason I want them is that I track how many cups of coffee I have drunk by how many little creamer-corpses I accumulate. I nest each empty neatly in the last: when the resultant structure has five circular ribs, it's time to stop.

Fog and a heavy frost: so heavy that it spurted from my scraper like a jet-ski, as I cleared the windows of the Honda. The tops of the doug firs are barely visible – pale ragged turrets against an even paler sky: sometimes they fade away altogether. I am uneasy this morning, full of doubts. I need to stop and think.

January: the month of the gray silent king.