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

slumped on a sofa, seated between three men, leering over her exposed breasts. Her right arm was bound in a tourniquet and in front of her, one of the men, being approximately five feet ten in height, grossly underweight, and having an uncanny resemblance to her father, was hunched over a blackened spoon with a dirty syringe, preparing a cocktail of drugs.

In the grimy spoon lay a concoction of heroin, crystal meth and cocaine. Into this the man squirted eighty units of water, lifting the spoon and holding a flame to it, dissolving the powder into a milky white fluid. He dropped a filthy cigarette butt into the solution to act as a filter even though the carcinogens present would have done more harm than good.

The man resembling her father then took the worn syringe and drew back the fluid until there were forty units pushing up a tiny point of air towards the needles tip. He lifted the needle to the horizon and gradually pulled back on the plunger, flicking the syringe with his index finger as he gradually moved the plunger towards the heavens, removing any residue of air from the liquid.

The man gave the syringe one last invigorative flick and turned to the girl whose body had become a mantel piece of sweaty, cumbersome hands.

There was not a sign of emotion on her face at all. Her eyes were irreflective and stared in abiding neglect out into an adjacent room where a running tap dripped water homogeneously into an underlying sink. One of the three men fondling her positioned himself to her right, steadying her bruised arm as the other two men elatedly remove her panties and continue the only display of affection she had ever known.

The girl whispered silently, a rhyme that time and time again remained caught in the chambers of her mind. The words seemed to trip over one another as they fell from her tongue.

“There goes that girl over there, whose not really here as she is over there. Unbound and unknowing, unwilling to care, mute to your calling and blind to your stare. See her you will and by that you will swear, that the girl over here is the girl over there.”

The father figure leaned over her body, pushing his whole weight on her right leg and aligned the syringe with her exposed sinking vein. He pushed the needle vigorously through her flesh and the sting provided her with a familiar sensation of being alive; pain being the only feeling kinder than love.

The man drew back on the syringe, filling the milky solution with explosions of dark blood and upon seeing the mix of colour, immediately forces the solution into the girl’s vein.

Her mouth palpitated for a brief moment as the liquid soared through her veins, accelerated by her failing heart. The taste of the shot coated the back of her dry aching throat. She swallowed several times, savouring the evidence before escaping once more with her eyes never straying from the tapping of tiny droplets of water, escaping from the clutches of man to join its brethren in the search for open sea.

The girl caught flight of one drop perched in midair and before it departed the obscenity of this passing sight, she cast out her soul in a single tear so that it would not have to remember, what se willed it to forget.

Charity let go of her smile and her distant stare and she cried; still holding tightly to her reflection’s grasp and grasping the thin air with her other free hand but her skin no longer felt tough, her nerves no longer felt dead. She no longer felt strong and fighting.

She felt scared.

She felt less alone.

She felt safe enough, to cry.

And as the tears rolled from her eyes, her salted struggle wetting her broken and blistered, acrid lips, the markings of all those men and women, stained upon her body; from her ankles, all the way up her legs and between her thighs, branded on her buttocks and her breasts, around her wrists and around her throat and so that they covered her eyes.

Her body was a temple of another’s touch; greasy marks all over her soft white skin, looking less like the girl that she sold to herself and more of the girl that she sold the barest of prices.

As she cried, her body stained more and more. The cuts and scratches and scars and scabs and bumps and lumps that she had painted with an avoiding eye; the debris of her repression, all became clear and stinging and they glistened as the morning light touched upon her streaming tears.

And she cried more and more; still clinging to her reflection that was now losing all of its wounds to the girl who clung desperately to her soul’s forgiving touch. And when she cast her final tear, her reflection let go of her hand and turned to her.

Charity looked helpless. Her body was hurting and she felt abandoned; without her tough skin and her defences to keep her far from the chill of her own guilty acclaim.

Her reflection touched the side of her face, looking her long in the eye and though hers were heavy and slated with truth and burden, her reflection’s were not. They looked clean and without deformity. They looked knowing and without oppression. They looked young and without fever. They looked cleansed and without fear.

Her reflection smiled and stretched its arms around her, pulling her tight against its body so that the morning chill no longer bumped against her skin and no longer danced with the fine hairs on her arms. Her reflection held her in a loving embrace, whispering in her ear as it laid its head upon her shoulder, smiling as it drifted into her body and vanished beneath a blanket of bruised and battered skin.

Charity stood in front of the mirror as she had when Joao had followed his expelled breath and she was enraptured in her own giving embrace, her arms stretched across her body, clutching to her skin, her nails digging in, not wanting to ever let go. She could feel her reflection stretching its arms inside of her heart. She could taste the tear that she had expelled so many times on the edges of her lips and it reminded her that she need not feel alone, not in any of this struggle.

Joao gasped.

He felt sick.

He pulled away from the steaming cup and purged on the floor. He was shaking feverishly, anger enshrouded his whole conscious being and he wished only to take her into the safety of his arms and if need be, to spend an eternity redefining trust to this poor broken girl for whom every man had betrayed when they ushered the words ‘I love you’.

He closed his eyes once more, in search for some kindness, some attribute of sweetness that this world had for her, and when he followed another drawn breath in to delusion, opening his eyes with a meddled worry, her last act washed over him.

She was standing on the shore of a beach somewhere on the other side of the universe and she was staring into the horizon where the ocean blue meets the cerulean sky, tasting every breath that she welcomed into her lifeless body. She sighed uncontrollably as she ran through a catalogue of undisposed memories.

“How I failed” was how she thought; blaming at first herself for how life did unfold and then, with every new breath, gaining clarity and accepting the inevitability of circumstance.

Her idea of love was different to Joao, to me and probably to each of you who read this story. To her, affection had meant intolerable cruelty. A vacation was not merely an exercise in family togetherness; it was escaping to her subconscious where her soul and last drop of sanity were spared from her incestuous father and all the men in her life that fate would have her drawn to.

Succumbing to this revelation would not prevent it from happening again; it would just add unconscionable irony to an already predestined path of surrendered faith and molested love.

She opened her eyes to remove the images from her mind, watching a tiny leaf being towed along by the gentle current, bobbing up and down on the even lapping swell.

With every transitory breath, she was alive.

She stood; as Joao did, her toes twitching and moving in the wet sticky sand beneath her feet while his did in his old ripped socks out of nervous apprehension.

Joao could sense in her that for the first time in her life; since she met forgiveness with her reflection and long after the people she had known were long since disappeared, including Joao, she was akin to innocence. The gentle wind lifted her fringe so that it flapped like a sail and the clear escaping air filled and expands her lungs.

She exhaled her final breath and dove into the ocean. With no desire to take another breath, she sank lifelessly into the water and gave herself to the currents which took her invitingly out to sea.

Joao inhaled profoundly and exhaled a long sigh of relief. She was now free, moving in spirit with her brethren as the essence of life.

Soon clouds would form above her and her spirit would evaporate momentarily, parting from the sea and moving through the sky to rain down on the world below.

Her soul would scatter into millions of droplets that would descend upon the earth, filling the cup of every man and cleansing the soul of the earth. She would nourish the thirsty planet that would in turn feed its starving guests.

Her soul would exist in every flower, in every grain of sand and in the heart of every man. And it is the heart of man that she would judge astutely.

Those she deemed worthy would be wrapped in her delicate arms. She would sing to their spirit and lesson its state of alarm. Those undeserving would taste her in every breath. She would poison their souls and send every man to his death.

When he opened his eyes, he could hear stirring near the bathroom. He felt destroyed. What a horrible weight this girl had had to suffice. And what strength she must have behind her smile to be able to keep that suffering from making her its pet.

He took her coffee in his hand and though he hurt horribly and was infected by her pain; as god must have felt, watching all of it happen but doing nothing to interfere, he did as she and wore himself a hardened smile to greet her as she woke.

When he entered the room, he could see that she wasn’t in her bed. He heard noises coming from the bathroom and assumed she must have woken while his mind was in dream and he inherited some of her displeasure. He walked over to the door and when hearing a pained cry, he worryingly called out but there was no word, only another pained cry.

“What should I do?” he thought. “Charity, are you ok?” he said through the door in a low whisper, but there was no response except for another pained cry.

When he turned the handle and pushed the door open, he saw Charity naked and leaning over the sink, her hands braced and her fingers almost clawing their way through the filth ridden porcelain. She was crying in pain but she was crying for more as behind her, with his left hand in a strangling curve around her neck while his right pinched, slapped and punched her buttocks and her back, The Bishop cursed wildly horrible words, calling her horrible names with his repugnant fat, sweaty and hairy stomach folding over her arching back while his eyes rolled backwards in his head, thrusting like a savage heated animal until he turned his head and saw his son’s disbelieving eyes wishing him to stop.

Joao stood in silent protest, the cup in his hand and disbelief on his conscious mantel. He couldn’t say her name. He couldn’t say a word.

As he stood there dumbfounded and broken, The Bishop watched him, grinning swimmingly while he defiled the only thing Joao had ever had in his life that mattered; biting her shoulders and spitting on her back.

He wore the same lecherous look that we had when he paraded around the farm with his loose shoes slapping on the cold tiles and his right hand bent over his shoulder with his leather case pinned to his back. He wore that same arrogant, molesting smirk.

Joao looked defeated.

He started to cry.

The Bishop laughed heartily and with his strangling hand still curved around the back of Charity’s neck, he clutched her hair with his free hand, ripping it back with sadistic vigour and lifting her pained and wanting face so that as he came inside her and as he screamed out her name insultingly and as she screamed out his, her eyes opened and the sight of to her only friend, the boy who loved her without condition, finding one.

“Joao,