Encountering only polished things made for easy innocence. The rich never learned, or they willfully forgot, the raw that came before the cooked. Building warehouses, planting and then picking coffee, making paper bags, packing and unpacking boxes, grocery shopping, washing cups. He thought of the tasks upon tasks that came before and after coffee. Cities would collapse without all this service, maintenance, care. How many advertisers and shops and prisons existed to hide labor and process?

How did you sort it out? Did one brood upon this over breakfast or ignore it? Sometimes in turning away you end up making a full circle.

Alfonzo laughed at himself. This was why he got in fights at birthday parties. How much was the right amount to know? How should an animal be? What did it take to really be a good boy?

According to the label, this coffee was shade-grown. Alfonzo hummed, Shade-grown, shade-grown. Never send to know for whom the shade grows; it grows for coffee. No animal is an island.

Alfonzo thought of his moldy studio. He remembered the apartment he and Vivi had shared post-college, with its stack of unopened bills and pyramid of half-rinsed recycling. Money smoothed edges. That’s why it was easy for the rich to convince themselves that the world was naturally smooth, and that it was the poor who made it jagged. How much did he himself want to forget and unsee?

Alfonzo balanced his hot coffee and almond milk in a cup. The cup rattled, spilled a little.

There was still no one around, so he thought he should amuse himself. Alfonzo put his coffee down by the record player and began to browse the music. The record collection went on and on. There were rare things he’d only ever read about, and countless albums he’d never heard of.

There was Brokenhearted Dragonflies: Insect Electronica from Southeast Asia, Otter Sounds, Dark Round the Hedges. There were the recordings of Full Mantis, Max Roach, and Annette Peacock. He flipped past Moon Dog and Chick Corea.

After more searching Alfonzo decided to play Josephine: Live. He was feeling nostalgic, and this familiar voice was what he wanted. Though he’d heard the album many times, the strangeness of Josephine’s voice never lessened. Josephine sang like all her kind, yet you could not mistake her voice for another’s. Her songs were plain ones about struggle. A long time ago, the rodents had risen up against poisoning and traps, and all the other violence heaped on their heads, and Josephine had been there to sing of it. But through her voice, you came to know how their community constituted itself in crisis and tension. Her society was always about to fly apart, and she sang to hold it together. But the tension of these impulses was almost unbearable, and the toll, too, could be heard in the artist’s voice.