Coffee and Sugar by C. Sean McGee (primary phonics .txt) 📖

body is god damn, mother fucking di-vine baby” she exclaimed.

The Bishop kept a caring informed look in his eye and he stared directly; with kindness and understanding, into the glassy eyes of The Angry Prostitute, ignoring the desperate defence that slapped against her thigh and instead focusing the warmth of his compassion and ready ear upon the tired and scared little girl that lay confined within this temple of abuse that; should he look long enough, would have her lift up her hand and will him to help pull her out and into the arms of our lord.

“Jesus Christ can suck my dick” she said, grabbing at her genitals and sneering at The Bishop who; with a wealth of faith in his heart, kept searching for the little girl or little boy as it may be, inside this wreck of a human being; looking for a slight tremor in the prostitute’s eyes to see if the child that he believed could be saved, was actually alive.

Joao watched from a sure distance as The Bishop raised his arms into the air, rattling the palms of his hands, light but very brisk as if he were brushing off the drops of water that lingered from his washed hands or shaking an imaginary Tamborine as the rhythm of god fed like a current of electricity from the soles of his feet through his believing heart, shining from his eyes and yearning to burst out of his fingertips.

“Praise be to our lord Jesus Christ, our saviour, the son of god, the king of kings” he sang, his voice booming; the only thing louder than the sound of belt buckles sliding into place and the jingle of loose change that hummed through the air.

He stamped his feet on the spot, one after the other as if he were making his pitch on a bed of molten lava and he shook his arms and hands like two great heavenly branches while he canted with his eyes wildly widened and his voice; at first warm and according, inviting the wounded bird to show its broken wing and then; when the bird hobbled off of its perch and tumbled about, out of reach, blossoming into a coarse and abrasive instrument of divine, oral detention.

“God has a place for you” he said, waving his black book back and forth, “where rivers of fire sear your tainted flesh and demons and devils molest and degrade your spirit for an eternity. An eternity of suffering and torment and misery, unless you repent to god now. Yours will be the worst suffering yet, you sick denigrate. You, you homosexual” he yelled at the top of his lungs as The Angry Prostitute ignored his plight and staggered off down the hill in the stream of indecency, cackling and cursing and pointing over their shoulders as they spread into the passage of day below, onto footpaths, onto buses and into the back of taxis.

The Bishop was furious. He turned to Joao with his face red and enraged, his knuckles white from the strain of his clenching fists, his veins popping out of his neck and his eyes, bulging like a poisoned cat.

“It’s not your fault you know. Fatts says nobody here can be saved. You can’t bring heaven where it doesn’t belong. You can’t save what god has already condemned” said Joao.

The Bishop said nothing. He took a pile of napkins from his pocket and gave them to Joao, pushing them into his stomach with enough force that had his much smaller son gasp with the wind being stricken out of him.

“Save your breath for where it counts donkey. You’d better start earning your worth around here or you’ll be right back on that farm swishing flies off horses’ arses. Do you hear me boy? If you disappoint me, I’ll set an example of you” The Bishop said jabbing his thick club like index finger into Joao’s chest.

Joao started knocking on every door, taking to the battered and boarded houses or wooden shacks; as they could better titled be, tapping gently against the splintered door frames and clanking rusted metal chains against the large bars in which they married, sending an awful screeching sound through the light sleep of whoever was making permanence of these shabby looking dwellings.

He knocked hard on a door several times wanting to agree with the immediate silence and allow whoever might be mandating his absence, to continue their private residence. When he moved to turn away; feeling horribly uncomfortable with every inconsiderate knock, he would be caught by the disapproving stare of The Bishop who; with wretched sweet breath and a stained glass in hand, was engaged on one hand in some distracted banter with a greasy fat truck driver while keeping one disciplining eye on his idiot son who; like a typical country mouse, was fumbling his way through a crack in the kitchen wall, petrified about anything grander than his own shadow; at least, this is how the drunken bastard saw his son.

The Bishop squinted his eye, lowering his thick mono brow and hinting for the boy to wait and Joao understood every inch of his mocking decency turning back to the door and lifting his little pebble like fist to tap against the metal frame on the heavily bolted front door.

He banged three times with enough tempered flare for someone in wake to know that he was there or for someone in sleep as to pardon from care.

“Fuck off” yelled a low booming voice behind the door.

Joao looked over his shoulder only to have the disciplining eye of his father whisk him back around to address his responsibility.

He knocked again.

“Whatta you want?” yelled the low booming voice behind the door.

Joao cleared his throat trying to steady his pitch and edge out the fear that curdled in his stomach and clung to the roof of his mouth.

“Uh, good morning, my name is Joao and I…”

“Fuck off Joao. I aint got nothing you can buy and I got nothing you can borrow, but I do got a really big gun though. And I will shoot you if you keep a talkin” shouted the low booming voice behind the door.

Joao held his breath, turned away, caught his father’s now drunken stare, turned back, released the breath, clenched his pebble like fists, took another breath, closed his eyes, wished for a moment, thought of Charity puling aside a host of branches to invite him into her solicitude, took another breath; this one loud and describing and merely a murmur compared to the breath he expelled; sounding out an obedient sigh like an injured calf having serving its purpose well, making the hunter know that this was hardly a game, with the sound he exhaled, carrying from his heart and soul, the full weight of the last drips of his waning hope.

He took another breath and spoke in machine gun spread.

“DoyouhaveapersonalrelationshipwithjesusChristandwouldyouliketodiscussthewonderandlightofourlordandpraywithusinourchurch?” he said.

Click, click.

‘Have a nice day” said Joao backing away from the door, ignoring the eye that was gnawing away at the back of his head.

Joao moved from house to house and at every door he was met with defensive rage and the clamour of hostility but at every door, he quietly kneeled to the floor and slid part of every napkin through tiny gaps in their doors, leaving a small tail of white flicking in the light breeze so The Bishop himself could see that Joao had tried.

But try as he may, Fatts was right.

The people who frequented this hill came here with the intention of bedding with sin, not cleansing themselves. Here they could exercise the demons that itched at their moral skin, begging to burrow into their domesticated hearts where it would split the fibre of their being should they not pick it from their sweaty pores and vanquish it in drunken orgiastic splendour upon the black veil of night. This was where the foul beast was abetted to stretch its legs, to run free and to have no worry.

These souls were not to save. They were being saved and the whores who hobbled about with infection drawn upon their skin and tragedy upon their youths were merely cunting priests whose moral servitude was to invite the devil between their thighs and gaping mouths and to swallow whole; like an open drain, the residue that built upon normal men, threatening to colour them badly, of which they must scrape off of their skin and cleanse the avenues of their minds in a storm of debauching indecency.

The whores were tainted angels and the drunks, the junkies, the perverts and the estranged, they came here to pray. Their lives may have been better for it; their children more loved, their wives more endeared, their neighbours more acquainted and the rules of social standard and heavenly tenure more adhered.

But behind some of these doors; the one’s that conspired with secrecy and were weighed with heavy locks, were the ones who made their homes in this refuse, having no choice but to shut their eyes as they washed their skin in the run off of human degradation, keeping a silted eye open as their heads sank into their stained mattresses and their ears fought to silence the whoring moans, the abusing seduction and the violent altercation that leant against their weighted doors, threatening to spill over onto the thin sheets that kept the foul air off of their aging sore skin.

These people needed to be saved.

“Good morning my name is Joao and I would like to talk to you about the love of our lord Jesus Christ. Do you have a relationship with god?”

Silence treated him like a dear friend, creeping up to his arm so that it shivered lightly as it took him in its embrace, squeezing the surety from his soul so that fright would warn away from the door and so that he paid no debt to god; not with his own life, not at this house, not today.

As he had done in the other houses, Joao leaned down to the floor and pushed the tip of a napkin through a crack in the door and something ripped it from his hands and swallowed it whole. He panicked and fell backwards awkwardly, his bum hitting the ground hard and his arms twisting under his body.

He stared at the tiny hint of darkness where a corner of the door was broken away and imagined to himself the worst kind of devilry, impregnated within the darkness. He wanted to run but something had him stopped and mesmerised and so he watched and listened to the sound; which was barely there, of a hand scratching at something; paper, skin, hair, clothes.

“Donkey,” yelled The Bishop, now heavily drunk, “here, now.”

Joao turned slowly, not wanting to pitch his absence and distraction to the tiny black hole in case the devil should jump upon his back and devour him like it had the small napkin that was ripped from his hands.

As he lifted himself off of the ground he heard a hiss come from behind the door, like the scoffing of a new idea; nothing loud or abrasive, but he heard it nonetheless and from the tiny atramentous hole between him and wheatear lurked behind the door, flew the white napkin that had been ripped from his hands. He followed with his eyes and his trembling heart as the napkin fell by his foot and then the hiss upon which he trained his ear; fell quieter as it became the molecular darkness in which it made its home.

He leaned down and picked up the napkin and scrunched it into the pocket of his jacket and then quickly turned and ran away from the rows of civic squalor towards the church where The Bishop stood; swaying in the light breeze, his teeth stained like the empty glass that sat perched near his greedy hands and his eyes filled with disgusting venom that Joao knew, would soon shower upon him with guileful ferocity.

“Get over here donkey. What did you do? Nothing? Fucking nothing. You disappoint me. You disappoint your mother. That’s why I’m cursed with you. You had no use, no worth on the farm and you have no worth here. You’re a disgrace. There’s not a kind word to be said about you. You’re proof that even the best of us, even me, good people make mistakes. You were am mistake Joao. You should never have been born” said The Bishop almost choking on the last word, collapsing onto a plastic seat and dropping his head forwards against his chest in drunken surrender.

Joao straightened The Bishop’s legs and settled him better in his chair so that he wouldn’t fall should the earth or his heaving belly tilt just a fraction. He then went and poured himself a coffee and looked over the mess that had surmounted on the floor, between the cracks in the tiles and up along the length of the walls.

They could hold neither a service nor a filth laden drug riddled