The push-button coffee machine

A button marked black, pressed, produces in order: a paper cup dropping into the tray, four seconds of grinding, and a thin stream of liquid that is coffee in roughly the way a photocopy is a document. Five other buttons sit beside it, each promising a different result and each returning something closer to the same result with a different smell layered over the top. The one marked soup has not been pressed, by any measurable evidence, since the machine was installed; its plastic retains a factory shine that the black, hazelnut, and hot chocolate buttons lost within the first month. The drip tray beneath the spout holds a half inch of a brown liquid that is not quite coffee and not quite water, topped off weekly by whoever notices first. Sugar packets and stirrers live in a bin to the left, restocked more often than the cups themselves, which suggests something about which parts of the ritual people actually finish. The coffee itself, tasted plainly, is thin, bitter in the wrong order, and gone in three sips. It performs its function on a schedule dictated entirely by how long an alignment takes.

Doreen Fitch