It seems like half the town comes in for coffee between noon and two, most of them hooded and mittened against the cold, some of them—despite their best efforts—appearing nearly frostbitten, their movement toward the café tables slow, their utterances clipped, their eyes still frozen into a sub-zero squint.

He observes them from his corner table, dispassionately but with such attention to detail that, in attending so closely to it, he almost ceases to exist. Several times, he forgets to breathe. It seems to him that his watch has stopped.

An unexpected snow squall breaks out over by the periodicals rack and small drifts begin to build up around the cookbooks and how-to manuals.

Finding the weather so suddenly the same inside as out, the snowbirds migrate toward more open air, leaving him alone at last, his coffee only half finished and twenty minutes of his lunch hour left.