by Bruce Cinnamon
You won’t be able to recognize each other until you’ve seen it for yourself. But once you do, you won’t be able to look at someone who has visited the Diner and not see it in their eyes, just like they’ll see it in yours.
You might be jogging along a trail beside the river, or pushing your cart down the aisle at the grocery store, or stopped at a red light. You’ll make eye contact with the person walking their dog, or reaching up for a box of sugar cereal, or pulled up next to you at the intersection. And you’ll know, they’ve seen it too. You won’t say anything. You won’t exchange anything beyond maybe a nod or the smallest of smiles, if even that. But you’ll feel the little solid seed of the Diner inside you, the grounding weight that wasn’t there before your visit. And you’ll feel the tingling warmth spread from your core to the roots of your hair to the tips of your fingers and toes, reassured by the knowledge that there is always a door to the Diner nearby. There’s always a place, outside of space and time, away from the worries of the world, where you can go.
Perhaps because of its very nature, the Midnight Diner is hardly ever talked about. It’s not one of those pieces of local lore that perpetuates its own mythology, like the secret nightclub under West Edmonton Mall that only plays songs that will be famous five years from now, or the natural spring in Goldbar Park that gushes a different type of tea at every new moon. You might find posts on the r/Edmonton subreddit about the Pierogi Man that prowls strip mall parking lots looking for people to absorb into his dough, or the rain-repellent cat that trots around the city during summer storms, at the centre of a moving, metres-wide column of clear air, paws perfectly dry on the pavement. But not the Diner.
As its name suggests, the Midnight Diner only appears after dark and it’s always gone by dawn. It only presents itself if you are alone – and not just on your own for a moment, but well and truly alone. Maybe you’re stumbling home drunk from a bar on Whyte Avenue, reeling from a night of rejection and regret, and there it is straddling the train tracks. Or you’re on a nighttime drive in an unknown corner of the city, not really going anywhere, just trying to get away from everything for an hour and listen to the radio, and there it is in the middle of an elementary school baseball diamond. Or you’re heading back to your car after a midnight screening you attended alone, barely feeling your legs as the winter cold makes a snack of your inadequately insulated flesh, and there it is in the middle of the street.
A silver railcar with neon lights and a simple, steady sign in the window: OPEN. Sometimes its chrome shines in the moonlight. Sometimes it looks dull and shabby. But it always entices, no matter its appearance. It always beckons.
It doesn’t seem to be strictly tied to any municipal boundaries. The scant whispers that do circulate about it suggest that the Midnight Diner has appeared as far afield as Edgerton and Entwistle, in the middle of a frozen field near Fairydell, on the mirror-smooth surface of a lake near Boggy Hall.
It presents itself to those who need it, even though they don’t know it. And once they cross its threshold – because they always do, they always follow the pull, whether they tell themselves it’s to escape the cold or investigate an anomaly or follow a drunken impulse – once the jingling bell above its door dances its chime down their ear canals, into their minds, then the Diner enters into them as they enter into it, a roaring ouroboros as they pass through the door.
The Diner is dim, suffused with soft buttery golden light from standalone lamps on every table. The broken jukebox in the corner plays warbling music – songs no one has ever heard before, but which are all achingly nostalgic.
The room is occupied with a half-dozen scattered characters – and they feel like characters, not like separate, real people. Like they are facets of the Diner itself, which of course they are. None of them are near each other and they never interact directly. But they all seem to be in a specific web of relation to one another, like stars in a constellation.
A fortune teller sits in one of the back stalls near the bathroom. She looks like a melting ice cream sundae – several mounds of colourful scarves, slowly collapsing in on itself in the heat from the candle at her table, the only one without a lamp. She stirs heaping spoonfuls of rainbow-coloured crystalline sugar into her teacup (she has an eclectic collection of cups and saucers, most of them chipped and some of them flecked with gold, stacked on the window ledge next to her table). She can read your tea leaves, or trace the lines on your palms with her rough, callused fingers, or pluck a hair from your head and stretch it out on the tabletop to see your whole life, like the rings of a tree.
She’s always shuffling a deck of irregular cards, and will spread them out in novel configurations on the tabletop (she’s covered the stainless steel with a moth-eaten silk scarf spangled with stars). She often gives a card away, a central message to take with you, though her deck never seems to get any smaller. The cards are as irregular as her collection of teacups, seemingly all from different decks: the Chevalier of String, the Twelve of Fruit, the Locksmith, the Forge, the Rivers Twinned, the Nine of Nights, the Eight of Cakes, the Ace of Clocks, the Spice King, the Rake of Spoons, the Six Anchors, the End of Sands. She offers the gift of context, reducing every bad day or miserable week or rough year to a small part of a greater whole.
The waitress behind the counter is a timeless paradox, her age as fluid as a lava lamp. Sometimes she seems to be a teenager, hiding behind her visor and chewing her nails as she observes the other patrons. You look again and she is a sturdy woman in her middle years, ladling hefty portions of steaming creamy soup into shallow bowls. Sometimes she is a grand dame, wearing her striped uniform like a gown and some bleach-scented yellow rubber gloves like opera gloves. And sometimes she is an ancient, timeless, ageless god, abstracted into whisps of shape and colour.
She offers a vast menu of dishes, some comfort foods you haven’t had since grade school, some entirely unfamiliar (roasted angel chilies with sparkling blue salt, sanguineberry cake with bathwater taffy). The special changes every day, and it’s always exactly what you didn’t know you were craving. She’s a bit gruff and a bit rough and it takes her a while to open up. But she’ll pour you a cup of coffee and cut through all the guff if you tell her what’s eating you up. She has the remarkable precision of a surgeon or a javelin thrower, and she’s very talented at popping all the balloons full of anxious, sour gas that you didn’t realise you’d been carrying around above you all this time. And once those floating, formless fears dissipate, it’s surprisingly difficult to recapture them in new balloons. Sometimes it feels fine to feel hollow, for a while, like you are finally light enough to float away yourself – then she’ll slide a famous Midnight Diner omelette in front of you (eggs folded over the concept of certainty) and bring your feet back down to the ground.
The cook is a big beefy bison of a man, a prairie minotaur with stove-scarred muscular arms and an apron stained with ink and glitter. He never talks, just glances through the small window into the kitchen from time to time, catching your eye as he prepares whatever you order, or whatever he thinks you should eat, which aren’t always the same thing. He seems distant, even unfriendly, and it’s natural to be a little afraid of him. But sometimes he brings out an uneven birthday cake and roars with unpolished joy to celebrate you. They all sing along, a garbled Happy Birthday that throws you back to as many birthdays as there are candles on the cake. And no one sings louder than him, clapping you on the back and squeezing your shoulder with the pride of a thousand suns.
The weary traveller sleeps in another booth, their face resting atop scattered, out-of-order manuscript pages that are marked up with the bright blue pencil that dangles from their limp fingers. Their booth is exploding with papers and books – ones you’ve always meant to read but never had the time to begin, and others that you’ve never heard of but whose covers are beautiful and whose plots seem perfectly aligned with your tastes. There are atlases of other worlds and maps with irreverent borders stacked around their table as well. It feels like you could build a fortress of books and crawl inside and fall asleep yourself.
The weary traveller never wakes. But there’s a booth across from theirs, decked out with the same dark blue crushed velvet benches (unlike the red plastic of the other booths) with a blue lightbulb in the table lamp. It’s the perfect place to curl up for a nap, with pillows and blankets snarled in a corner of the booth. If you bring a book to bed with you, you’ll sink into its pages in your dreams, journeying through a thousand worlds and living a thousand lives. Or you can snuggle up with a book of poetry, and experience the pure, distilled intensity of an emotion or a colour or a single poignant moment. Or you can curl up around yourself, without a book, for the deepest, darkest, most dreamless sleep you’ve ever had. Or you can pry some blank pages from under the weary traveller’s elbow, spiral the pencil from their fingers, and dream some stories of your own.
The bathroom attendant is a cat. He stands on his hind legs and wears a little red vest with brass buttons and a pillbox hat like a cinema ticket-taker, and he can talk just as well as all the others. The bathroom itself is a green oasis, with a glass greenhouse roof and a seemingly endless jungle of lush leafy plants. Birds trill and flit from branch to branch in the rafters. Fragrant tropical flowers bloom in all corners, filling the room with gentle perfume. Fountains seen and unseen trickle, cold water condensing on the bronze bodies of lovers and lions from the steam in the air.
Steam rises from a series of sunken pools, each of them suffused with a unique and powerful essence. One has the roots of a cherry tree twisted down into its waters, and it fills you with a deep and natural sweetness as you soak amongst the tumbling petals. Another is heavy with turquoise blue salt, and you can float supported and weightless at its surface. All of them unlock something in you, releasing a deep-seated tension from your muscles, which dissolves into the water and never returns. The cat prods you to stretch like he does, and you find that your body is as flexible as a blade of grass.
After your bath, the cat shows you a vast wardrobe of new clothes to choose from. He says it’s the Lost and Found, but all the clothes fit you perfectly – the rich, comfortable fabric embracing all your lines and angles. The cat pokes fun at the outfits you choose, and always assembles some incongruous alternatives for you. But you cheekily point out that he’s only wearing a mismatched vest and pillbox hat, and grin as he rolls his eyes.
Sometimes, when you go back into the Diner’s main room, there’s a piano player on a small stage at the back. He has kind eyes and a neat moustache, and a black bowtie that’s always undone hanging around his neck. He’s the most gregarious of the Diner’s resident clientele, happy to spin a yarn or compose a song inspired by a half-forgotten episode in your life. His deep, rich voice and tinkling notes lead you back to old moments, letting you relive and release unresolved feelings that you didn’t even know you still held.
You sink into the booth nearest his piano, feeling its notes reverberate through your body. The waitress brings you a milkshake or a cocktail or a mug of warm tea, whatever matches the mood of the song. You sip your drink and stare out the window into the night.
The windows are often fogged over, or covered in frost. But if you wipe away the moisture and scrape away the ice you can stare out into the darkness and see twinkling lights. Sometimes the Diner will shake as a rattling train passes by. Sometimes you hear the distant blare of a train horn going past a crossing in the night. Sometimes the Diner will be surrounded by howling winds, the heart of a storm eager to get in. But the Diner stands strong, unmoving in even the greatest tempest.
Because that’s what it is, ultimately. A rock. A retreat. A refuge from the passing squalls. You can stay in this haven as long as you want, and no time will have passed when you leave. You can eat and sleep and soak in the baths and listen to music and read a hundred books and make a hundred plans. You can rest. You can let go of stress. You can stop, for the first time that you can remember in years, and catch your breath.
The Diner isn’t there to challenge you. It’s not a test or a trap or a trick. It’s a place to reset – the ultimate dividing line, the before-and-after border in time. You leave when you’re ready to leave. And in the after, you find that the Diner is still there, inside. You still have a door you can open, a sanctuary that nothing and no one else can reach. And when you see someone with the weight of the Diner in them, you feel happy for them, and you wish it happened more often. Because everyone deserves to visit the Diner. Everyone deserves to have an unassailable oasis inside, a single point of stillness that grounds an unshakeable soul.
Bruce Cinnamon is a writer from Edmonton. He recently published his first novel, a magic realist alternate history of Edmonton, and continues to write stories inspired by local history. Find out more at brucecinnamon.com
Capital City Press Anthology 