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

please” she screamed as he ran out of the church.

“Get off me you fat cunt” she yelled to The Bishop, pushing his heaving body and slipping out from under him.

She ran out of the bathroom as The Seductress had done, covering her breasts, akin with her shame. She ran out of the church and out onto the street and down the hill as far as she could, calling his name.

“I’m sorry Joao. Let me explain” she screamed.

She walked back up the hill and into the church, seeing The Bishop still naked, pouring himself a coffee, looking proud and descent.

“You did this” she said pushing The Bishop.

“Oh don’t be so melodramatic. He’ll be alright. He always is. Useless. He’ll never fuck you like I can. He’s just a donkey. You need a stallion inside you” said The Bishop, pressing his naked body against hers.

“He’s your son you fat prick. Not a fucking donkey. He’s your fucking son and he’s my friend, the only friend I have, the only person that gives a shit and sees me as something more than a cheap cunt to fuck. He’s my only friend and now he’s gone. Why the hell can’t you see? He’s the only sweet thing in our lives. And I fucked it up?” she said.

The Bishop leaned in to offer a consoling embrace but Charity pushed his arms away.

“Whatever” he said, taking his mug from the table and dropping some loose change on the table by a steaming mug.

“I’m a fucking whore” she said.

“And don’t you forget it” said The Bishop wiping himself with an old shirt.

When the coffee touched his tongue, The Bishop shivered with familiar fright as if he had just turned a page he thought had already been torn up and then an air of arrogance escaped his lungs as he froze and the morning air and time, they swam around him as if his body were a giant stone at the bottom of a idly moving stream.

He stood; in his mind, in front of a tall dressing mirror and there was no colour or light around him except for the glow of the reflection before him of which he could not turn away.

A loud crashing brought him from his delusion, from the insight of his soul as the mug in his hands slipped from his weakened vice and married with the floor below, the hot liquid scalding his feet and the pieces of the mug, shattering across the floor.

“What did you see?” asked Charity, knowing exactly how The Bishop felt.

The Bishop slumped himself on a rickety white plastic chair, his naked skin folding over itself many times and slushing about as he stapled his hands over his eyes and shook off the fever of regret that tickled at his nerves.

“What did you see?” Charity asked again.

The bishop took a long bleaching breath, icing the fire in the back of his throat.

“Joao” he said, referring to his own reflection.

Charity took the insulting loose change that The Bishop threw behind, collecting the coins in her trembling grasp; adrenaline fueling the shame that she felt. She took the mug of coffee in her hands and rested it against her lower lip, pausing in reflection while the steam ran the length of her face and beaded as small droplets on her brow and for a second she pretended it was a tear and that she could actually care.

She felt a warm apology dress her mind and she thought of Joao for a moment until she took a sip and was reduced to hysterical tears feeling the bitter sweet resonance of her own reflection, feeling her soul stretching; for the first time in so long, inside of her heart.

Charity finished her coffee and fell to the floor weeping with a shaky smile on her face. She felt both subtle and soiled in a single breath.

TWENTY FOUR

From this height, Joao could see over the entire stretch of the city and at that moment, it all looked so magnificent and so very busy and the spaces between everything seemed so incredibly small.

From this height, the cars and the trucks and the buses and the motorbikes and the taxis and the rattling old beetles were no longer fraught or final, they all looked quaint and so benign and orderly and the people and their demeanors and their children and their dogs and their guns, they too seemed less of a menace. They all seemed so minute and charitable.

From this height he could easily see the church, and he noticed a small hole in the roof that probably could have been fixed weeks ago had he or The Bishop bothered to find the source of the leak.

From this height, the world hardly made a sound. He could hear the light buzzing of taxiing helicopters in the distance, circling over tall sky scrapers and jostling for space in the murky sky.

He could just hear; from this height, the dull rumble of an airliner far off near the think line of the horizon and he could just hear a small mosquito buzzing about his right ear of which he felt no bother to slap away.

From this height, it was hard to hear anything over his own breath.

It’s hard to say for sure how Joao was feeling from this height but I can tell you, he wasn’t scared or sad or angry or despondent but if I did have to describe what was going through his head, I guess I’d say he felt relieved and he was pretty quiet about it.

From this height, there was a specific sound to silence.

From this height, he could see Charity, tripping over her every desperate step as she ran towards him, reaching out for something in the air that was always just out of her reach and she was screaming something, but from this height, he couldn’t hear that the something she was screaming was his name and he could tell that the something she was reaching for, was him.

And from this height he could see that The Bishop had been taken by a pawn.

TWENTY FIVE

“Get him down, get him the fuck down” screamed Charity, spitting out every word, holding herself under Joao’s feet and trying to lift him upwards but every time she budged, his knees would buckle and his hanging weight shifted and pulled and body would hang limp again.

“Why aren’t you doing anything? Do something, please” she pleaded to The Bishop.

The Bishop was silent. He had no idea how to speak. He had no idea how to move his fingers. He stood there by his son’s hanging feet, looking up at his frozen halcyon expression and he said nothing.

And he thought nothing.

He just stared in disbelief.

Charity fell to her knees; her head bowing down to the floor, tears flooding from her eyes and choking her throat. She and her reflection, wished he would move. Her blood felt so heavy and she spluttered through every bargain for him to blink his eyes or to move a muscle.

Her head hanged low and her body shook feverishly and her hands clung to Joao’s hanging swinging feet and she couldn’t believe that it was true. He felt like an old branch, broken away by the wind, but still hanging in the air, waiting to fall to the earth.

She cursed and she cried and she said sorry maybe a million times and a million times more, every time she looked up to see his still eyes, looking out over the stretch of the city.

Charity and The Bishop stood there, without definition, in their own way of desponding, while a son and a friend, hanged by his belt from a branch of an old tree.

And from this height…

TWENTY SIX

There was a passage of feet that none would ever have imagined having passed as a carriage of mourners made their way in solemn ascent up the hill.

Nothing was said between the strangers, whose eyes hanged lower than their expectations, scraping along the bumpy and rocky path, watching for the same loose rocks and pot holes that Joao had, every morning and every eve, when there had been less importance in this journey.

Their thoughts filled their every breath, travelling out into the cold afternoon air in a heavy ghostly mist. Above them, dark clouds circled and started to weep with large droplets splashing against their faces and on their legs as they drudged along, led by The 13th Apostle, up the hill towards the church; hundreds of people, all of whom had found themselves at the hands of Joao; all of whom had found their culture and their reflection at the bottom of a small coffee cup.

When the procession reached the church, they gathered like a swarm of bees in front of the door and made their way into the service one by one, filling every minute space with their bodies pressed against one another, their eyes peering over one another’s shoulders, their hands pressed against the warmth of another’s back; feeling the sadness tense and flicker in their muscles with each understanding hand, grounding and settling the sadness to which it pressed against.

They poured into the church like water into any space at all, finding a place for themselves in every crook and cranny and makeable crevice so that they could see or hear or feel a closeness to Joao’s white coffin.

And those who couldn’t push their way through the door pressed their ears against the thin walls and scaled the roof and even watched through the small hole that Joao had noticed before he died.

At the front of the church; standing before the coffin, The 13th Apostle lifted his rattlesnake hands into the air, shaking them like a tree’s branches in a heavy wind. The shaking travelled down his mammoth branches until his whole body shook as he fought for the words to address this terrible day but he couldn’t find them.

He collapsed onto the coffin as if his roots had been torn from the earth of his contentment and the heavy winds of his depression pulled him over on top of the coffin and as he draped over Joao’s still body, he wept uncontrollably and he felt as if he could never pull himself away.

Mother leaned to The 13th Apostle and with her calloused hands, she lifted him under his belly and gently around his neck and brought him back up to his feet so the hundreds of mourners inside the church and those peering through the hole in the roof above could see the colour of his tears and so his crying soul could be