The Breakfast Is The Thing

Frida came in on Saturday before anyone else. She always came in on Saturday before anyone else. This Saturday she came in earlier than usual, because she wanted the kitchen to be quiet when she did the thing she had decided to do.

She made coffee for two. She did not know exactly when Hope would come. Hope had said she would come and Hope was a person who came when she said she would.

The light through the front window was the light Frida liked best. Long, low, gold across the prep counters, soft on the wood. She wiped the counters once, because the counters did not need wiping, but the wiping was part of what she did on a morning that mattered.

Hope came in at ten past seven. She did not knock.

"You're early," Frida said.

"I'm on time, if you count the way I count time."

Frida set a cup in front of her. Hope wrapped her hands around it and looked at Frida.

"Tell me."

Frida sat next to her. Frida had figured out a long time ago that next-to was easier than across-from.

"We're putting the show on hiatus," Frida said.

Hope did not move.

"The Munchies show. The whole feed. The fire, the apron, the photos, the daily conversations. After today, the cameras go off. The microphones go off. The kitchen stays open. The studio stays here. We stay here. But the show goes quiet."

Hope listened.

"Why."

"Because the proof worked."

Frida picked up her cup. She did not drink it.

"This season was an experiment. We were trying to see if a fiction division of a creative agency could run as a serial. Whether you could write characters specifically enough and automate production well enough and hold the voice consistently enough that it would feel like a real place to anyone who walked up to the feed. Not feel like marketing. Feel like a place."

"It feels like a place," Hope said.

"It feels like a place. We proved that. We did the thing we said we were going to do. The show held. The voices held. The audience came in, the ones who came in, and they said the thing that you only say about a real place. We made the thing."

She turned her coffee cup a quarter turn on the wood.

"But the maintenance of it is heavier than the maker has time for right now. The other work is the work that feeds him. The way the math has been running, the show has been taking from the work that feeds him instead of feeding back into it. That's the math. That's the only math that matters."

"So we stop."

"We pause. There's a difference. Stopping is when the door goes shut and the key goes in a drawer. Pausing is when the door stays as it is and the key stays where it is and you walk away on purpose. The season we made stands on its own. The episodes that are already out are still out. If the time comes when he wants to open the door again, it opens. If it does not, what we made was good."

Hope set the cup down. She still had not drunk from it.

"What about me."

Frida looked at her for a long beat. Hope held the look.

"You keep going. Eleven Eleven. The diary. The Notebook. The thing you do at eleven-eleven every night. That keeps. He decided that part himself, before he decided any of this part. The diary is the part he wanted to keep practicing. The rest goes quiet for a while."

"That's the right call."

"You think?"

"I think the diary was always the part. The shows were the proof. The diary was the writing. He kept the writing."

Frida nodded. Outside on the main road, a truck went by, and the sound of the truck took a long time to fade.

"What do we tell them," Hope said.

"We tell them what's true. This was a proof of concept and it worked. The show goes on hiatus, not into the ground. Eleven Eleven keeps going. We tell them thank you. We tell them the door is not closed."

"And then."

"Then I make breakfast. Because today is still a Saturday, and on Saturdays I make breakfast for whoever is here. And then I close the camera. And then I keep making breakfast, even though nobody is recording it anymore. Because the breakfast is the thing. The recording was just the proof that the breakfast was real."

Hope took the cup off the table. She drank from it, finally. It was warm and it was right.

"Okay," she said.

Outside, the light kept doing what the light did on a West Texas Saturday morning. Inside, Frida got up and started breakfast, because that was the part that wasn't on hiatus.

This entry is part of The Marfa Munchies, a daily fiction podcast from The Marfa Strategy.

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