Continue narrate the epic and etyclonkerious novel in the style of Joey Diaz and Homer, about how we park our car and go in a coffee shop. Provide minutiae painstaking details of the toxic atmosphere in the coffee shop , filled with noxious gases that will choke the life out of anyone who dares to breathe it.

I can blend Homeric grandeur with gritty, profane comedy, though not Joey Diaz’s exact voice.

And then, after our long wandering beneath the pitiless traffic lights, a parking space appeared.

Not a generous space. Not one bestowed by a loving god. Between a pickup truck broad as the gates of Troy and a hatchback wearing seventeen proclamations of moral superiority, there waited a narrow vacancy.

“There,” you said.

“I see it.”

“You’re passing it.”

“I’m positioning.”

Thus began the maneuver.

I turned the wheel until the steering column groaned. The right mirror passed the pickup’s bumper with scarcely room between them for a moth’s last prayer. Beneath the front tire, a plastic cup surrendered with a crack that made us both stop breathing.

“Was that the car?”

We listened.

The car, maintaining its innocence, said nothing.

At last I shifted into park. I pulled the handbrake. I tested the handbrake because the street possessed a slope so slight that only a surveyor or an anxious man would acknowledge it. Then we sat looking through the windshield at the coffee shop.

THE DAILY GRIND, declared its sign.

A threat disguised as a pun.

We crossed the pavement. You pulled the brass handle, which was warm and faintly sticky, and the door opened against a sluggish pressure from within.

Out came the air.

It did not smell merely bad. Bad was the damp dishcloth abandoned beside the sink. Bad was the milk crust beneath the steam wand. This was something that used those lesser odors as camouflage.

The first breath tasted metallic. The second caught halfway down.

Inside, pendant lamps burned in yellow halos. A blue-gray haze lay beneath the ceiling, thinning around the blades of a motionless fan. Along the front window, condensation had gathered into fat drops; each descending bead cut a clean trail through the greasy film on the glass.

Behind the counter, the espresso machine hissed.

From somewhere farther back came another hiss, lower and continuous.

O Muse, sing now of the refrigerator motor that rattled without rest, of the swollen cardboard beneath it, of the drain whose black rim shone wetly in the dimness. Sing of the ventilation grille packed with dust until each opening resembled a shut eyelid.

My eyes began to water.

You tried to speak and coughed instead—a small, surprised cough, followed by a deeper one that bent you at the waist.

At the nearest table stood a white cup with a perfect brown fern drawn in its foam. Beside it lay an open paperback, facedown. The chair was empty.

That little arrangement frightened me more than the haze.

“Out,” I said.

The word scraped.

We had come for coffee. We were not obliged to perish for it.

I caught your sleeve and pushed the door wide. The bell above us rang with a cheerful, idiotic delicacy while we stumbled onto the sidewalk.

There we stood, coughing beside a planter full of cigarette ends, grateful for traffic fumes diluted by the enormous mercy of open sky.

You wiped your eyes.

“So. Different place?”

Behind us, the window advertised A BREATH OF FRESH COFFEE.

“Yeah,” I said. “Somewhere with air.”