City of Dreams
by Matthew Brennan

On the day that the Capital Coffeehouse opened in Port Townshend, the first cup of coffee they served spilled when a waitress bumped the patron’s table, newly situated within the floor space. The coffee surface listed, then tipped back across the still-full mug and breached the far ceramic lip, streaming down the alabaster side, pooling in the saucer, and splattering onto the new wood floor where it was ignored among the grand opening celebrations and seeped in to stain.
Through the wide coffeehouse windows, our patrons could see the harbor, where ships glided by under full sail, the steady winds carrying them into the harbor. Across the street, the grand opening banners of the Townshend Bank still flew. From above the cliff, the sounds of saws and hammers drifted down and out over the water as more houses and banks went up, seemingly overnight. Among the conversations spoken over those first cups of coffee, excited speculations of the promised Northern Pacific Railway extension were not long absent.

Seventeen years later, that first coffee stain remains, darkening a patch of flooring where a handful of regulars gossip in hushed tones. Absent are the sounds of construction, and the ships that steam past the windows continue down into the Sound and no longer make anchor at port. The bank windows across the street are boarded up, and the vaporous hiss of the coffee machines only reminds us of the trains that never arrived.