No Mask, No Service.

“No Mask, No Service,” reads a red-lettered sign, crooked among others secured to the screen door. The sun’s heat is felt intensely showering my neck as I stretch a thin rectangular cloth across my mouth. Adjusting around my nose and chin, I stretch and tuck the white elastic straps like hooks around the protruding cartilage that is my ears. Shrunken in yesterday’s wash, my nose flattens resisting the cloth’s newfound pressure while tension of the elastic pulls at my ears flaring them outward — an added challenge to breathing hot humid air. The timber-framed door creaks as I draw it open before shutting itself under the tug of springs. The entrance sequence terminates with the ‘smack’ of the doorframe and a high-pitched ‘ding’ followed by a muffled but audible “Be right with you.”

Greeted with a veil of refreshing cool air, I breathe in and fill my lungs with the chilled aroma of freshly ground coffee infused with fabric softener. Straight ahead sits a register, and a dull black “X” laden with powdered dirt and dust in patterns of shoe tread is fashioned to the floor. I’m the only patron in the coffee house, save for the masked middle-aged man to my left scratching his arm and a barista heard upon entering but not seen. I step up to the front of the register and straddle the thoughtfully placed “X” in my black Nikes.

The man itching his arm glances over at me. He’s wearing a medical-grade N95 mask straddling a different “X” at a prescribed distance from a “Pick-Up Here” sign that hangs above a wooden counter-top home to a plastic spray bottle and…