Solar Surfer Drinks A Cup Of Joe

Nobody knew whether the diner had been built around Saturn or whether Saturn had simply wandered into its parking lot one Tuesday and never left.

Either way, the coffee was terrible.

The Solar Surfer occupied Booth Nine every morning at precisely 11:73. The clock insisted such a time existed. Nobody argued. In a place where onion rings had gravitational fields and the jukebox only played songs from futures that almost certainly aren’t about to happen, punctuality was strangely important.

He arrived on a board carved from condensed daylight, still warm from skimming the photosphere. Tiny flares escaped his cuffs whenever he reached for the sugar dispenser.

"You've been out again," the waitress observed.

"I caught a solar wind all the way from Betelgeuse."

"That's impossible."

"It wasn't trying very hard."

She topped up his mug anyway.

The regulars pretended not to stare. Every afternoon Solar Surfer peeled another thin layer from the sun and folded it into impossible shapes. Cranes. Rabbits. Entire weather systems. By closing time they always evaporated, leaving behind the faint smell of cinnamon and electrical storms.

No one asked why he surfed.

No one asked what he was chasing.

One evening, the rings of Saturn stopped turning.

They just stopped.

Forks hovered above pie. Conversations froze mid-sentence. Somewhere outside, a moon overshot its orbit and drifted into deep space. If you listened hard enough, you’d be able to hear its faint apology for failing at the one job it had and that to tell its mother it love her as it disappeared into the blackness.

Solar Surfer sighed.

"I wondered when they'd notice."

He stepped outside, his board of daylight tucked beneath his arm.

The rings had become tangled, twisted into a knot the size of a continent. Millions of years of celestial elegance reduced to cosmic headphone cables.

He paddled into empty space. Someone had to sort it out, after all.

Every sweep of his hands untied another century. Every carve along the rings sent chunks of rock and ice gently back into rhythm. Sparks scattered behind him like schools of fluorescent fish.

By dawn the rings spun again.

He returned for breakfast.

The waitress slid pancakes across the counter.

"Everything sorted?"

"For now."

She nodded, as though he'd fixed a dripping tap.

When he left, he forgot his coffee mug.

Nobody moved it.

For centuries it sat there, awaiting his return. Over time, it collected echoes of conversations had at nearby tables, errant plumes of stardust that snuck in while the door was ajar, the memory of failed eclipses (which occured whenever Mr Sun and Mr Moon weren’t on speaking terms), and became a sancturary for three endangered constellations. 

Travellers began visiting Booth Nine simply to look at it.

Some claimed that if you peered inside at exactly 11:73, you could see someone surfing across the edge of the nearest sunrise (but they were almost always drunk).

Whatever legends sprung up about the Solar Surfer since his last visit to the clapped-out Orbital Diner, his legacy remained.

The rings of Saturn still span.

Daylight still shone.

And the coffee still tasted awful.