Coffee Shop Bean Stock or the Giants

        Those ungrateful slobbering giants won’t stop beating their drums.  The sight of their beastly limbs is mesmerizing, and the rhythm they implore is terrible and undulating.  I’ve been in this coffee shop for many hours now and I think the management is beginning to get suspicious, but what can I do?  It was my friend Alba who told me about the giants.  He told me about the coffee shop on 9th and Main.  He kept going on and on about a portal that existed at that spot. 
         I asked him why it would be so, but he would give me no answers as to the why.  He doesn’t believe that there needs to be an answer for all things. Alba is what I would call a mystic.  He believes in portals and spirits and all sorts of things that I denounce as nonsense.  I’ve known him since childhood, and he has always been strange.  He would speak to ghosts with regularity and claimed to be able to see them when we were in elementary school.  I think that I saw a ghost once; a shadowy form in the woods wavering between Alba and I, but as an adult I dismiss this memory to the overactive imaginings of a child.  As to the current situation, all he told me was that as soon as he entered the coffee shop he could sense something amiss.  He said that he sensed a deviation in the barometer, or some such thing.  He scolds me that I am not sensitive. 
         “But you can see them plainly!  I have never in my life been in a place like this,” he implored.
         “Then what, is everyone blind to these giants?” 
        I speak to him in a manner that is very rude and derisive, but he answers me calmly.   
      “No, it must be that the portal is invisible to them.  I have visited the place several times now and it is always the same.  But it should not be this way.  Two worlds must be nearing.”
      He was very disturbed when he told me these things.  I felt sorry for him.  The mysteries of life disturbed him and his sadness became mine.  He was one of my only friends and I had treated him badly by my disbelief.  I pondered over all the failed relationships of my life, the goals unattained, the opportunities squandered.  Why is it that I ingest this misery as if liquid from a spoon?  From the spoon into a syringe which plunges into me.  My brain leaves a bloody swirl of water and blood as emotional evidence that only I can see. 
      Alba is all that I have anymore, and I have taken so much from him even, but I sense that he feels pity for me.  I am a leech to him and all I do is berate him for his gift.  Life is an eternal mystery for people like me.  All I ever wanted was to be a writer, but I could not even make myself to consistently put word to paper.  Maybe I am lazy, for I can not even manage this simple task.  Just put words to paper; my utter uttering litany.
      Just a few days ago Alba warned me not to go to the coffee shop.  There was a rare quavering in his voice as he spoke to me, a wan diluted quality to his skin.  His cheeks seemed sunken, his eyes dark.  But Alba has forgotten the liquid elixir that he gave to me long ago.  Those were days when he was happier and believed in the goodness of all things.  He had told me on that light spring day that the amber liquid would make me sensitive.  I laughed at him.  He told me then to drink it, “for we are even now among the council of angels.” 
         I did not drink, but neither did I return the elixir.  I remember him telling me that the liquid must be diluted, that it was too sweet to be had pure.  And so now I find myself at 9th and Main.  I purchased a milk tea and poured the amber elixir from its jetty beaker into the tea.  Next thing was to sit in the far south eastern corner, for that is where Alba described the disturbance to be at its fullest. 
      Almost immediately upon drinking the mixture did I sense a change, the very atmosphere had changed in the under lit airy shop.  The hordes of pedestrian traffic outside the tall window panes became something distant and unfocused. There was an unnerving wavering as if the air was suddenly charged by the chiming of thousands of ringing bells.  My auditory sense also changed, taking on an atavistic aquatic nature.  I felt that I could hear to the far depths of the oceans like a lumbering beluga whale.  I contemplated a hallucinatory effect.  Maybe the elixir was nothing more than a drug, but this theory did not endure in my mind.
         Not much time has passed now and I begin to see them, their arms covered in tattoos and coarse hairs.  Moss and green growth hangs from their chins and beards.  They are giant men of ancient forests; forests never touched by fire.  They constantly beat at their drums.  The heads of the drums are made of skins.  The giants are carnivorous.  Blood covers their hands like grease.  I feel that I am floating among them now, but they can not see me in the dark caverns that are their eyes.  The longer I sit here in trance, the more illusory time and reality become.  In a distant way I can sense that the sun is setting outside of those large glass window panes.  A barista walks by me.
         “Did you see him leave?”
         “No I didn’t.  What a weirdo.  I thought we might have to call the police.”
          I vaguely understand that they are talking about me.  They do not see me anymore.  Now I am floating down between hungry maws, nothing more than a gnat, a mote.  If I do not leave this place I will surely be devoured, perhaps just a garnish or a pinch of salt for their stew.  I feel that I owe Alba an apology, for I have done this thing to myself.  What would I tell him?  More importantly, what it will be like inside the belly of one of these cavernous men.  Will there be others like me waiting in their bowels.  If this were a dream I would scream, but I am afraid to wake those that slumber.  Goodbye world, another existence now awaits me.  My name is Jonas.