Coffee and Sugar

Coffee and Sugar

C. Sean McGee

Coffee and Sugar

Copyright© 2013 Cian Sean McGee

Rotting Flower

Published at Smashwords

Araraquara, São Paulo, Brazil

Third Edition (2024)

All rights reserved. This FREE ART ebook may be copied, distributed, reposted, reprinted and shared, provided it appears in its entirety without alteration, the reader is not charged to access it and the downloader or sharer does not attempt to assume any part of the work as their own. Free art, just a writer’s voice and your conscious ear.

Cover Design: C. Sean McGee

Interior layout: C. Sean McGee

Author Photo: Carla Raiter

Chapters:

CHAPTER ZERO

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER ZERO

Get over here little donkey. Look at him; doesn’t he look just like a donkey? Long useless arms, hands like a little girl. And look at those fingers; they’d snap just trying to grip a toothbrush. Hey donkey, bring your daddy a drink said The Bishop in a drunken slur to Joao whilst chafing some passers-by.

As he rocked waywardly on his white plastic chair, the thin legs bent under the strain of his heaving upper body that twisted and turned with the eschewal of his foul exuberance.

From behind the counter came Joao, walking with sullen eyes and full hands; balancing a rickety metal tray holding a large bottle of cachaça and a single glass. As he crossed from the small kitchen to where his father sat, he patiently and obsessively counted every tile, watching his feet magically appear from out of sight and then always stepping on the space where his eyes had been.

He wondered to himself that if his feet always landed where his eyes had been, how much longer would he need to stare at the moon before they carried him there?

He imagined then that the tiles below him were great ash-white asteroids and that if he stayed on them longer than it took for a passing eye to pass on by, he would fall forever into the oblivion of space, always falling downwards, regardless of what direction he was falling; kicking his legs aimlessly whilst somehow keeping the rickety metal tray steady so as not to spill daddy’s drink.

As he moved from asteroid to asteroid, he sensed himself closer to the moon and with every next step; the thrill of accomplishment was met with the hurried fright of expected failure and he nervously tip-toed his way over the last few obstacles.

A heavy depressive weight cemented itself in his stomach, pulling on his focus and negotiating the exchange of his equilibrium as the sound of a low phlegmy cough willowed through his ears and threw him into expectancy.

The boy tipped his hand slightly and his eyes drifted from an ash white tile just beyond his right foot to a piece of space just outside the reach of his left arm where the glass of cachaça sat idly in mid-air, having so naturally and unsubtly just slid off the rickety old metal tray like water off a duck’s back and crashed against the floor, smashing into a hundred thousand pieces and waking the old man from his momentary slumber.

Are you retarded? What the hell is wrong with you boy? You just dropped a full drink. Have you any dignity, any bloody respect? And in the house of god? What the fuck is wrong with you? yelled The Bishop, slapping his fist across the table as if he were laying his firm hand across a cattle’s rump, ushering it to move its insolent arse along the path of his righteous choosing.

I’m sorry daddy. I’ll clean it up, you’re right, I need to focus. I’m sorry. I promise I’ll be better from now on said Joao, putting the tray down on the table in front of his bullish father and hurrying to the floor to sweep the shards of glass into a small pile with the thick of his palm, trying to be swift yet gentle so as not to cut his hand.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s all I ever hear. I’m sorry, Daddy; I promise I’ll be better. You’re the reason this church is always so empty. You cursed the farm and now you curse my church. How about actually using that thing inside your head for once? It’s called a brain. Figure out how to turn the thing on and use it. You know I wonder what I did to anger Jesus for him to grace me with you. You don’t see your mother here picking up that glass, do you? No, of course not. I do everything for this family and still, this is what I get, a lack of respect from my own son. I know exactly how Jesus felt with Judas and… said The Bishop, trailing off into lexical slur before his heavy eyes and drunken breath undid his temper and lowered his head upon his outstretched hands; his face nudging the chilled bottle of cachaça like a cat’s head, rubbing itself exhilaratingly against the tender loving touch of its owner’s amorous caress.

Silly, silly, silly said Joao as he continued to clean up the glass from the floor.

As he swept the last shard, he cut the tip of his pinkie finger and it stung wickedly as it basted like a hairless chicken in the dregs of old cachaça mixed with cigarette ash and cheap domestic bleach.

The cut burned horribly but he wouldn’t make any more of a fuss than he already had. He had no right to deserve compassion for his own stupidity and that lesson he hadn’t forgotten, having been beaten into him many times before at a time when his drunken disgrace of a father carried more swing in his fist than he died in his curling tongue.

He tore off a piece of cloth that was wrapped intimately around the broken end of a metallic squidgy and doused his wound in a vile cocktail of undesirable fluids; the remains of what would be of every Sunday service in the world’s least popular church in a part of town where not even your own shadow would stalk you under a beseeching summer sun.

As he washed the floor with a putrid blend of alcohol, bleach and old dishwater, he allowed himself to slowly drift into the impossible again, this time imagining himself as the lead singer of a rock band taking to the stage in front of ten million people; maybe more and running around the length of the stage from corner to corner standing on top of the tables; that to him were giant fold back speakers and holding his microphone stand high into the air and singing at the top of his lungs; Baby you’re a rich man, baby rich man too, you keep all your money in a big brown bag inside the zoo, what a thing to do.

Joao loved that song; he never knew who sang it and he hadn’t mastered the pronunciation but for what felt like a very long time, he would hum the tune quietly to himself and disguise it as evening prayer so as not to offend his simple but gargantuan mother and foul-mouthed displeasing father, sneaking up on the words he knew and then pouncing on them whilst splashing through the melody like a massive puddle in a summer rain.

He never quite knew exactly what he was singing but he imagined a very rich man that had so much money and he was really worried about trusting it with his financial advisor so he put all of his money in a big brown paper bag and snuck into the zoo one night; late, after everyone had gone home and when the keepers who stayed there overnight had fallen asleep while watching their favourite television shows.

Then, when he knew nobody was around, the rich man cut a hole in the fence and dragged behind him, his big brown bag full of money and left it somewhere that he thought nobody would find it, probably in a monkey cage, but whoever wrote the song obviously thought that was stupid because they couldn’t believe he would do something like that.

The song was explained to him when he was young by a travelling European hippy; one of those spiritual questers who in the search for their inner Zen, cast themselves into a river of disquietude thinking the key to existence was found in the inheritance of the external struggles of the downtrodden native peasant; tied spiritually to nature, so that when they returned to the drudgery of their corporate middle-class configuration, their feet could be grounded, their mind humbled and their heart could be deep-rooted in the memory that even to this day, they knew and lived the plight of cultural indignation and that the Indian inside of them would beat the tanned hide, playing its hollow drum as the beat of their heart while he or she hanged tight to the arduous threads of their inner sanctum as this cruel world threatened to copulate with their identity; or something equally introspective.

He said the zoo was a metaphor and asked Joao if he cared to know what it was a metaphor for. Joao just smiled, nodded his head and asked; what’s a metaphor?

The significance of the song wasn’t important to Joao. He didn’t need to understand the words to enjoy singing them just as he didn’t need a doctorate in geology to enjoy throwing rocks.

And as he sang and danced around the room, he accidentally kicked over a pile of crates and old cardboard boxes. The boxes had been stuffed with construction material to make them more sturdy for the Sunday service and he squealed as he stubbed his toe against the bricks, causing the old man to be jolted from his drunken pasture and throw his weight backwards, opening his eyes in a drunken flurry and waving his arms about as if he were calling a 747 to land.

He eventually fell backwards on the ground below with his head hitting the floor and his stubby, little legs kicking away in the air. And as they kicked, one of his feet knocked against the plastic table making the bottle of cachaça fall onto its side and spin in a flashing circle, moving dangerously close to the edge.

Joao leapt from where he stood, diving through the air and catching the bottle just as it rolled off of the table, and with the precious cachaça entrenched in his hands, he crashed down hard against the floor hitting his chin on the wet tiles and biting down on his tongue. But, the bottle was safe and for that, he hoped the old man would be slightly happier than displeased.

The Bishop stepped over him; reaching his hand down to pick his sweet reward. He made his way to the podium which sat next to the bar; at the head of the church. He wobbled and swayed as he stepped up onto a little wooden box hidden behind the podium and held his arms out in the air, welcoming the eternal love of Christ.

The Bishop fought angrily with gravity and his weak grip as he wrenched hard on the bottle’s lid trying to twist it open without success.

Surely this excaliburian bottle has been packaged for the king of kings, to set free the spirit of Christ to fight the evil in the world and lead mankind to the judgment.

This was what the old man thought as his sweaty palm slipped and slid over the metal lid and twisted and turned until the skin on his palm burned and it burned and he cursed a ton of vile obscenities into the air, throwing all of his insults at his dim-witted son who was now picking himself up off the floor, looking disgraceful in his Sunday’s best with a trickle of blood running from his chin down onto his white shirt and a stupid washcloth wrapped around his right hand.

You’re nothing like your kin; always on the near side of an accident. Your brothers, now they were smart. Don’t know how in god’s grace I ended up with you but for the eternal grace of Jesus, I will endure your hellish deviancy. For the love of god, would you look at your shirt, it is a disgrace, you are a disgrace. Hurry back there and make yourself presentable for Jesus. There’ll be no service with you looking like that yelled The Bishop, steadying himself on the podium and trying to catch his swaying vision by steering his head in all directions, overcorrecting each time and aquaplaning his conscious mind, taking with it, the bottom of his belly as with every spin of his mind, he felt his stomach swinging about wildly and willing itself to evacuate onto the floor below.

What’s the time donkey? he yelled out at the top of his lungs.

Behind a curtain in a small room behind the bar, Joao was busily removing his shirt and quickly soaking it in water and bleach before the blood stained permanently. His chin was stinging as the warm humid air flowed against the small, loose flap of skin from where he had hit himself against the ash-white tiles; ash white because no matter how hard he scrubbed or how much bleach he used, he just couldn’t wash away the filth that had collected over the years that. So instead of returning to an off-white like when they first moved in, they had a thick greasy and greyish residue from all the years of dirty shoes, cigarettes, beer, cachaça, semen, urine and rain having washed all over it and so, no matter how hard he scrubbed, the best he could get was an ash white colour.

It’s eight thirty-five, yelled Joao from behind the curtain; racing to dress himself in a clean white shirt to match his Sunday suit; the pride of any man’s possessions if his heart was true to the lord that is.

Why did you let me sleep this long? You know the service is forty-five minutes and I’ve only got twenty-five minutes before the soap operas start. You’ve upset Jesus, said the old man.

Can we miss the soap opera tonight? asked Joao.

What? screamed The Bishop belligerently.

Every Sunday we give a service from eight until eight forty-five. Not a second earlier and not a second later. At nine o´clock every night, we sit with Jesus and watch ‘The Carriage of My Heart’. That’s the way it always is, it’s the way it’s always been he continued in a lecturing tone.

Sorry Daddy, I didn’t forget I just thought that…

You didn’t think little donkey, that’s your forte, speaking on an empty mind. Now what are you doing in there? yelled The Bishop, ushering the boy along so that they could start their service.

I’m coming, Daddy, he said, tucking his shirt into his pants, all the while staring at a picture of his mother who sat upon an old wooden bench on their farm wearing a long floral dress that covered her big bulbous knees and holding; in her manlike hands, a small pocket-sized leather bound bible; being long from where they were and surrounded by barren land and lots of stinging insects.

A joyous warmth washed over Joao as he thought of the work he and his father were doing for the sake of their family and more so for the kind and brutish woman sitting painfully still in the photo.

Joao came rushing out from behind the curtain and sat on one of the crates in front of his father who was now standing behind the podium with his chest high into the air like a proud preacher, waiting to deliver the word of Christ, our lord and saviour.

Fix your tie son, you look like a Catholic, he said acrimoniously.

CHAPTER ONE

Joao was by no means any more special than any of his eleven brothers or eight sisters. In fact, working on the farm, from where he was born and subsequently much later expulsed, he had always proven to be the appendix of his family’s working organs.

His hands were too small to grasp and his legs were like two elastic bands balancing on ice cubes. He had the coordination of a dizzy drunkard and all the force of a polite request. As a young boy, he could barely even carry his own reflection in a mirror.

As for the labour of attending to the land, his sight was poor and his bulimic learning had him knowledgably bankrupt, being able to only hold onto an idea for as long as it would take him to forget it. So useless was he in fact that he couldn’t even pick a seed from a grain of sand. His worth on the farm and more so, to the family, could be summed up in the inspirations of his father;

Little useless donkey, he’d say, you’re only talent is in breathing. God gave you lungs so you could stay alive long enough to trouble him a little less.

Joao never took it to heart inasmuch as he never argued himself out of accepting the truth that; on the farm, his presence alone was akin to that of a drought. Whenever he neared the toils of his siblings, they would curse and moan and band together to shoe him off like a diseased cattle; with him, wandering off to graze by himself in the dry dusted earth of the unwanted and unmanageable land they had always called home.

His mother; bless her heart, was no kinder than a bull ant in her maternal affection; a giant hulking mass of a woman with elephantine-like calloused hands that were more leathered than a cattle’s skin and tougher than a crocodile’s arse.

She always wore the same floral dress that struggled to adapt and stretch around her huge knobbly knees. It was a white cotton dress but over the years it had worn itself into a reddish, orange hue from the time she spent with her knees buried firmly into the dusted earth, breaking and then turning the ground with her bare hands, doing the lord’s work to unshackle the dry dusted earth from the devil’s unquenchable thirst.

His mother was no stranger to hard work and had run the family farm since she too was a child, having dealt with her own parents’ untimely death in the fashion of digging her fingers into the dirt and burying the mounting stress and sadness of her burden, with every seed.

And so, she passed on to her own children what had helped her to survive for many a torrential season under the harsh sun and parched earth, feeding them from an emotional well that was as dry as the Sahara and as deep as a lizard’s print in the sand. Instead, they learned and drank from the goodness of Lord Jesus Christ, quenching their thirst on his divine words and baring themselves through the agonizing sores on the tips of their fingers with the promise of daily prayer.

Hard work was the ink on which their lives were scribed and Joao had always struggled to find himself; as a part of the family and as use to the land. He had not the strength of his brothers, nor the homeliness of his sisters, making a burden of himself wherever he stood.

From the moment he learned how to crawl, he had almost instantly; as some self-preserving nature, started to distance himself from the accident of his nature which; as one and one is as to two, would be the inexorable disappointment in everything that he was to do.

His brothers and sisters teased him daily, calling him cruel names and pushing him into fox holes, burying him up to his neck and leaving him to roast under the scorching sun and swell up like an oddly shaped balloon as the stinging ants crawled over his face, taking out their own pent frustration towards this godforsaken arid land by biting into his milky white skin that would quickly turn pinkish red as the sun preyed upon his fair complexion.

Their father, the old drunk preacher, egged them along and made residence of the boy’s sentence - to be the butt of their humour and the footstool unto which the insurmountable weight of their spiritual abandon rested so heavily, making light of how they spent their days; one after the other, turning the soil and suffocating their hope in an impotent dry dusted earth.

There wasn’t much for the children to like about Joao, in fact, his father used to deny having ever been involved in his conception, saying instead that his wife had once swallowed a poisoned seed; one passed through the hands of the devil who had come dressed as a cunning trader and from that seed then spawned the flower of Satan that then blossomed into the gangly little donkey called Joao.

Although nobody actually believed his story, the other children loved to listen to their father’s fevered sermon. Nobody believed it, nobody except for Joao that is and for this reason alone; he accepted the cruelty of the family to which he so longed to one day belong.

Every night before he lay his oddly shaped head down on the bumpy ground to set himself to sleep, he would pray silently; whispering inside his own mind, for Lord Jesus to take him away and find him somewhere where he could belong; not so he could be happy, but so his brothers and sisters would no longer have to feel so full of spite that they needed to curse and refer to cruelty to irk the foul form that nested within his skin and tricked its way into their salvation. And also, that his mother may live a single day without having to see the shadow of her disgrace walking in her footsteps and begging for her embrace. And as for his father, well, his father was a preacher and on terms with Christ, so he needn’t pray for someone who as a servant of the Lord would obviously bargain their own redemption.

Every night though, he thought of his family and how much he loved them and it grieved him thinking how something as simple as his being was enough to cause them so much hurt and for god; because of his existence, to have to go so far as condemning this land to bear no life to any seed which made its bed under where his cursed feet had left their impression.

But it wasn’t all so terrible for Joao.

Not always anyway.

Their farm had become; over the years, popular amongst travellers; Europeans mainly, looking to absorb themselves in the rustic and arduous countryside and enrich their identity by assembling some closeness to their primitive tidings like an eagle on a spiritual quest, deciding upon his ascent to shut its eyes and flap with one wing.

There was one visitor who made an impression on Joao. He was unusual in that he was unlike the other travellers who yearned and likened to quieten their educated tongues, speaking only to the dry dusted earth with the sound of their knuckles scraping against the sharpened edges of reddened stones.

In fact, this stranger had the knuckles of a newborn baby; rounded, smooth and unblemished like a ripe tomato. There was not a single line of bother or burden across his pasty white skin and he had an annoying happiness about him, always appearing out of nowhere with a guitar around his neck and not a speck of dust on his knees, always toting that imbecilic donkey grin as if he were reliving the moment he blew out the candles on his seventh birthday every single moment of his life; completely inappropriate and horribly distracting.

At first, Mother thought he was just always hungry so she’d shove a beet or two in his open gob hoping he’d wander off and keep himself busy chewing on it for an hour or two until; like the rash on her gargantuan thighs, she could figure out how to get rid of him without having to skip a beat of work.

When; almost immediately, The European spat out the beets and returned to his manic grin, she realised that he wasn’t hungry and was probably just retarded; one of god’s little miracles. And so, in the end, she let him be, expecting no more out of him than she would a stubborn wart or dead cattle; much like her ne’er do well son, Joao.

And so, for a short time, Joao had a friend and he felt less uncommon than he had had for the entire of his life. The two were inseparable. It was the Cheshire stranger actually, who goaded Joao to make his first coffee and it was he who taught him that coffee was more than a drink.

He said it was one of many fractals of existence; examples of universal mathematics and that like life, the perfect drink should be bittersweet and that coffee is the resonance of existence in that; like the perfect coffee, life has many grains of bitter days; the type of days that could rot your stomach if they are all that you had; but, every now and then, one has a few sweet moments that make the tough days easier to digest, meaning one can take the learned lesson from life; the good and the bad and then strengthen their resolve and return in the morn with an eager thirst for more.

Life is coffee and sugar he would say to Joao, teaching him that when making the perfect coffee, he should become the person for whom the drink will be prepared. 

He should cast their bitterness and struggle into the cup and then drizzle; like a light rain, the fondness of life that are the subtle, sweet moments that quench the aridity in the drought of one’s spirit.

It is he would say, a reward for what has been given and what has been done; as a solution is to a problem, as heaven is unto earth and for what the beginning is unto the end. Every ending should be bittersweet.

Although Joao understood little of his conned musings, he did like the stranger’s maniacal grin and how he waved his arms around and stamped his feet like a musical gorilla while he ranted in his philosopher’s tongue, holding the cup of coffee knightly in his hands as if he were raising the wounded body of Christ up into the open mouth of heavens above.

And so, while the maniacal stranger strummed away on his guitar, humming a song about a rich man and a zoo, Joao went about pouring his heart into every cup, imagining the burden being worn by his mother and the bitterness that lathered in the thick callouses on her skin. And he then prepared a coffee to suit, with the kick of a stubborn ox and only a hint of sweet summer rain; just enough to wet the sting of the broiling, in temporal drought that etched in the