Coffee and Sugar by C. Sean McGee (ready player one ebook .txt) 📕

Such a thing, to be less than zero.

Joao spent the rest of the afternoon on his hands and knees scrubbing and scraping and clawing and scratching at the marks and filth and dirt and grime and soot and stains and smudges and smears and urine and vomit and cachaça and beer, he loosened with bleach and a few of his tears, throwing the full weight of broken promise into every sweep of his hand.

Family is a cruel and depending appendage.

“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” The Bishop said in a drunken slur to Joao whilst chafing some passers-by, rocking waywardly on his white plastic chair; the thin legs bending under the strain of his heaving upper body that twisted and turned with the eschewal of his foul exuberance.

Joao stood near his bed, staring at the hanging mirror, looking beyond his frail impression and seeing in the outline behind him; Charity, holding a brush of leaves with one arm raised high above her kind adoring face, her congenial smile inviting him into her safe sacred place, far from the light of his familiar hurt.

He looked then to his right and saw a photo of his mother; a gargantuan woman, sitting alone and unemotional on a wooden bench where behind her, the arid and barren land soliloquised the ravages of drought, its cant; invisible to his ear but the words to its poetic dismay were etched in the long, drawn and desiccated stare of his mother, a look that thirsted one of their hope and felicity.

His father was yelling something from outside. It could have been an insult or an order. Either one would have been spelt the same had it been written down on paper.

Joao continued to stare at the image of his mother and where once he felt a desire to belong; to find some meaning and purpose, now it felt as if he were looking at an x-ray of a tumour that was suffocating his soul, one that had always been a part of him, one that was responsible for the who he was, the way he thought and the way that he felt.

A tumour of which he had to efface.

He thought then of Charity and he felt a tingle through his body, a warmth somewhere near his heart and he forgot about the parts of himself that were uneven. He felt special and cared, if having only the thought of her alone in his life were enough for his soul to be attended.

“I’m coming daddy” he said, tucking his shirt once again in to his pants and adorning his jacket, preparing for an evening service that would not come.

Joao stepped out of the room feeling different.

The Bishop looked him up and down with an unapproving eye and a grimace, as if some wild beast had just passed wind in his direction. He grunted to himself and exhaled in dissent.

“Fix you’re tie,” he said, “you look like a catholic.”

Joao pulled at his neck tie, pushing the thick bulb tight around his neck so that it hurt every time he gulped on a breath of air.

“How many people did you talk to? How many confirmations did you get? Well?” asked The Bishop.

There were no answers that would be sufficient. None that were true anyway. Joao shrugged, feeling useless and stupid, having been armed and educated with his father’s impotent knowledge and now having to report the failings of such and have to garment these failings as somehow being his own.

If his father’s effort was only to make the boy feel poor and useless, then the entirety of his work and knowledge was golden and the effect of his magic was pure show.

“Nobody would answer their doors. And the others, they’ll not come” said Joao.

“The whores only come for money and even then, they’re just pretending” said The Bishop.

“I tried dad, I really” said Joao.

“What did you call me? You never stop calling me sir, ever. Insolent little slug” said The Bishop sternly.

“I’m sorry sir. Earlier, this morning you asked me to call you..”

“Are you calling me a liar or stupid, which is it?” The Bishop screamed lifting his hand high into the air and striking the back of it hard against Joao’s cheek so that he fell backwards against the giant statue of Jesus, stinging his skin and bruising his ribs.

“No sir. I’m sorry sir” he said weeping.

‘Stop your fucking tears. It’s embarrassing. Sit up. The service is about to begin” said The Bishop, leaning down to the table where between two statutes was a small mound of cocaine that he swished about into three thick lines and like a diver hungry for their first breath of air, The Bishop snorted every grain of white powder in three foul swoops, licking his fingers and patting his nose as the symptom of his morning cheer and constant cold became evident.

“God is great” he screamed.

The roads downtown were coarse and bumpy and the buses in the city traded practicality for comfort and safety. The driver sped along the road, weaving in and out of traffic like a mosquito would, the clapping hands of a desperate camper, himself not imagining in his mind a lick of difference between sitting behind the wheel of a bus and sitting behind the wheel of a beetle, driving the former like the latter, his right foot planted firmly on the accelerator as he swung the wheel left and right clipping mirrors and bumpers and waving his left arm out of the window as if he were reaching for god’s hand to pull him out of the coming wreckage.

The bus was packed as it always was with the morning flood of weary and worn workers and beggars and priests and thieves; sounding out in their heavy moans a chorus of fatigue of which they swapped for choking black fumes that hanged in the thick moist humid air like a poorly lit decoration.

Some coughed and some blinked of their eyes, others sneezed into their hands and then rested their hands on the backs of others when the bus would hit a bump or a puddle or a pedestrian. And their sticky, dirty hands clinged to sweaty backs and to greasy hand rails that were so crowded that sticky, dirty hands lay on top of other sticky, dirty hands like an orgy of worms as thick, bulbous hairy fingers rolled over and in and out of one another, wrapping tight like a retracting coil whenever the bus shuddered or a pretty girl bid her brace before many fat, disgusting men.

Joao stood wedged between a silver bar which pushed against his spine and a large gingerly woman whose giant low hanging breasts seemed to enclose themselves around the curves of his face so that the sweat that stained through her shirt and dripped from her chin stung his eyes. The woman’s stained t-shirt was more like a wash cloth now as with every jump and jolter or the bus, her enormous breasts shook up and down and dragged Joao’s face along her chest where her t-shirt streaked across his eyes and his chin like a filthy rag on a toilet floor.

He tried to hold his breath but it was no use. Her sweat ran down his chin and onto his neck where it trickled down his body and tickled his skin. When he tried to lift his hand to scratch his belly and dry the woman’s sweat by patting his shirt against it, the woman slapped him over his head, short and sharp to stop his wandering hand from coming close to her curvaceous body.

“Touch me and I’ll crush you” she said, slapping him once on the head.

“Sorry mam. I’m not trying to touch you” said Joao.

“I’m not good enough for you to touch? That’s what you’re saying? I’m just a fat bitch, huh?” yelled The Obese Woman.

“No mam,” said Joao choking for air, taking in every breath, the warm air that curdled below her arm pits, being able to taste on his tongue, the fruit of the giant woman’s labour, “I have an itch and I just wanna scratch.”

“Oh you have an itch you wanna scratch do you? Dirty little no gooder” she said.

“I’m sorry mam” said Joao, straining from being buggered by the bead of sweat that ran down his chest and settled by his naval begging to be touched and mopped away from his chest.

“How about you lose some fucking weight you fat nigger” said The Nazi.

“Excuse me?” said The Obese Woman.

The Obese Woman turned angrily to face The Nazi who was standing on the steps in front of the open door as the bus sped along the busy avenue. It was the same Nazi that Joao had seen every time he rode the bus. He was a big man who wore big black boots with white laces and his pants fit him very funny. They didn’t come down to his heels. Instead, the legs of his pants stopped near the top of his boots so you could see his socks underneath and he had red braces on his pants like an old farmer but they were full of badges. And he wore a dark blue jacket that had some symbols on the arms and he had a crudely drawn poo tattooed on his forehead. It was the same man who always sat in front of Joao looking angry whenever there was a black man on the bus.

Joao squealed like an injured puppy when the woman turned, the force of her anger spinning his small frame like a thin wire scraping his back and spine unnaturally against the pole and his squeal was heard only by the author of this story who ensured that you the reader also heard it as Joao’s face was buried deep between the woman’s heaving breasts that were like two wrecking balls now as her anger married with the rule of gravity to swing her body and her breasts and Joao in absurd directions as she pointed her finger and hurled a tonne of abuse at The Nazi who stood arrogant and unaffected, just an inch from her scorning lips, standing coolly on the steps of the rear exit.

“You heard me; n,i,g,g,e,r” he said spelling out his insult in a worsening derogatory tone.

“Fuck you, you racist honky” said The Obese Woman, spitting at the end of her trade.

Joao wriggled and squirmed under the weight of the woman feeling every bit like a cat in a bag trying to squeeze his way out of this uncomfortable situation.

The Nazi and The Obese Woman continued their racial tirade, neither finding more grace than the other, both taking to lower blows to reduce the other to submission but their words and shouts and spitting and insulting just continued the entirety of the journey whilst Joao counted out in his head, the number of stops before having to stretch his skinny little hand up and out from beneath The Obese Woman’s breasts and to desperately press the red button to bring this circus to a stop.

As the bus swerved through traffic, knocking everybody this way and that, a chorus of abuse spread through the bus with the frustrations of the people being exalted in foul words and pushing and shoving; too close to one another for any real hurt but close enough to make a mark.

There were the elderly cursing the youth who sat vacantly in their priority seats, either pretending to sleep, looking absently away or glaring back in obvious undisciplined dissent.

There were poor wrestling with the rich and the poor who were dressed as rich cursing the rich who spoke with poor tongues and poorer minds.

Everyone found some difference that could serve as a canvas in which to paint their disappointment and tired appreciating committal, yelling and pushing and finding weakness