Coffee and Sugar, C. Sean McGee [highly recommended books txt] 📗

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 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, he 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 bitter sweet 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 can rot your stomach if they are all that you have; 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; 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 bitter sweet.”

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 back of her throat.

And so, at the end of every day; when the unforgiving sun made its bed in the blanket of the horizon, his mother, his father, his brothers and his sisters would all return from their toils on the land to a single cup of coffee awaiting each and every exhausted hand; a flavour unto its own, prepared as a toast to the marriage of the arduousness and amenity of their unique existences; the perfect coffee and sugar, brewed as the sum of their every day and then; in every morn, as the darkest hour turned to the faintest light when in the outstretch of night, the sun birthed from nature’s womb, a coffee with sugar would be waiting each and every one.

Joao was happy to find a place; somewhere useful to belong inside his family, even if it were for just a minute or two at the start and end of every day and so he dedicated himself to becoming an artist at what he did, putting his heart and soul into every single cup, watching from the creepy shadows as each and every person whisked up their cup gingerly and pressed it gently against their lips, lightly breathing a chilling wind over the skin of the coffee; just enough to shake off the lines of steam that clung to the surface like fine dust on old photograph.

He loved to watch their eyes speaking what their voices could not. When the coffee touched their tongues, their pupils would shudder, as if the sun had just taken refuge in a blind man’s eyes, unshackling some obedient disconnection concerning within, shocking their senses into familiarity and as their eyes settled and their hands clasped the cup, their fingers folded gently like the pages in a book; as if in silent prayer and each and every person would; like a child seeing themselves for the first time in their own reflection, feel the warmth of their own aching heart stretching down to iron out the creases in their souls and as each drop rolled from their wilted, cracked lips, over their enslaved, domesticated tongues and deluged their droughted senses, each and every person discovered their own existence and the effect of their own heavenly embrace.

And so, as every brother and sister heaved their chests against his infinitesimal frame barging through the racks of darkness, out of the old swinging doors that squeaked and squealed under the tear of rusted hinges as they flung back and forth, stirring the wasps that slept on the frame just above; angering them into wake to start their day more belligerent and beguiled than the last, Joao fell; from the push and the shove, backwards into a useless heap on the dry dusted earth, dressed; like the stranger, in a Cheshire smile, no longer yearning to belong, until it was, that he looked upon the table to see one cup left untouched.

And in every eve and every morn, a final chill would slip through the tapered cloth that kept neither the sun nor the wind from molesting his tender skin, a chill that crept from his spine through to the fine hairs on his neck that shrilled with a fevered disappointment as the coffee he made with the all of his heart sat quiet and tepid next to a yellow, stained glass where in it housed the escape of a single clear droplet; like a poisoned tear, running from the sweetness of the rim where a small swarm of bees all bumbled about and pooled in the thick well of pasted sugar at the bottom of the glass.

Joao could never please his father. Even with the passion of his art and he; hidden in the blanket of absence, out of sight, his father would never touch a single drop of his coffee.

Instead, the old man started his every day with large glass of cane juice, sweetened with eight large spoons of white sugar. So sweet was it, that his lips bore the stings of hundreds of bees that swarmed drunkenly around his glass every morning; he, waking them from their delicate slumber into a trace like gravity about the cracks in his mouth and upon the broken edges of his filthy, yellow glass.

And every night, his father would greet the going down of the sun with that same filthy yellow glass, served tall with the heavy aroma of cachaça, filling a bottle or four into his liver before his reverend mind rested in the stillness of night.

The Bishop; as of which he was spoken and revered across the community of farms, cared only for the sweetness in life, having beared no grief, no hardened days and wearing nothing of the bloodied, blistered hands of his wife or of his children. He was a preacher; one of the finest orators ever to be carved in the name of Jesus Christ and the scars he wore were visible in his heart, not on the souls of his feet.

He alone was responsible to dig the spiritual well for which his family thirsted. But he was not just the surveyor of divinity for his pious lineage; he was in fact the voice of god, the servant of Christ for every poor farmer within miles that all travelled on donkey, horse and foot, on bicycle and rusted beetle to tap into his divine grace; to bridge themselves to his link to god.

Every Sunday they marched over the dry dusted earth carrying with them the emotional burdens that they longed to trade for spiritual restoration; a sense of purpose, strength and direction that they could take back with them to fasten the buckles of their determination to ground themselves in the fight to overcome the imposing will of self-defeat in each of their own personal struggles and then; in their au fait fight, together as a band of brothers, enduring the test of god to make fertile; by their loving grace alone, the parched and impotent womb of nature.

In the late afternoon their shadows would ascend from a faint line in the distance, far beyond the limit of orange and red earth and beyond the splitting sounds of shovels and spades scraping and cutting away at the crumbling soil like a malignant cancer where hope itself was reserved in the farmer’s hearts and not exposed at the tip of their blade where the blunt edge of diligence bore through the cynically expectant soil.

Joao would always be the first to see them coming; his eyes floating free like his unlaborious hands, unabridged from the pursuit of work as he spent the whole of the days watching his brothers and sisters breaking their spirits against hard rock and the kick of stubborn mules.

In his own mind he was becoming the thought of their labour so that he could be the bitterness of their tireless grind and then imagine what sweetness would be lulled in their hearts while their fingers blistered and bled and the reddish purple rash between their toes readily worsened.

This was his work; to become their somatic discontent and peer behind the thick callouses of their hearts to find not only the condition of their assiduousness, but also, the colour and song of their souls so that when they rested their rusted trowels and bade farewell to the suffocating leather that molested the sores on their feet, they could all spend a moment or two in private solicitous prayer, consuming the sum of themselves, just as a drunk might pause to admire the submissive, accepting and apologetic eloquence of his battered wife or how the successful executive might take a moment to count; on one hand, the sum of all the days he had spent watching his son becoming less like an emotionally wanting child and more of a cold and unaffecting, disconnected version of himself.

What his brothers and sisters tasted was the extent of their cruel impiety bridged with the amiability that they themselves were flawless strangers too; the kindness in them; imagined as already having been abjured or aborted, that they would recognise as an illness would it ever seep into how they went about administering the predicament that was their hardened selves.

They encountered a moment of tender awakening that each would render in a longing stare and gentle embrace of their fingers around the inflecting ceramic reflection of their laborious yet laudable lives and the prolonged heavy breath that would follow every sip, ushered out the abandoned and forsaken sediment that clung like a sider’s silk to their exposed and vulnerable, infantile souls.

So, while his hardened siblings bruised their backs; basting under a fiery orange sun, Joao sat in simple contemplation watching their toil and envisioning how the arid land fought so gallantly to undo; unto it, what do his siblings would like to have done.

And as the sun threatened to explode on the ridge of its decent; stretching its rays around their desiccated skin like the long stinging tentacles of a jelly fish lashing at its prey as the tides pull it further from its mooring, being sunk and weighed down by something more insurmountable than its own daily depression, Joao watched in expecting delight as from the fatiguing horizon came the birth of one shadow; at first seemingly an infinitesimal fracture in his sight, then a tiny black spot that soon morphed and broke away from itself and multiplied like a viral cell