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

“You see that large cage over there?” said The 13 Apostle, pointing to the back of the auditorium where a large metal cage stepped out from the wall and stood all the way to the rooftop above.

“That’s where we record, edit and send the word of god around the world. This will be the largest functional studio in the city, bigger than the TV studios” The Apostle said.

Joao’s eyes were wide and impressing.

“But it doesn’t come cheap Joao. The work we are doing here, to rebuild the temple of Jesus Christ, it aint cheap. We’ve made an emotional plea to our disciples, making it easy for them to donate to the building of the church and being a part of something so grand and universally important. But it’s not enough Joao. We still need another eleven million dollars to finish the works and I can only do so much and that’s where I need you, Jesus needs you´” said The Apostle.

Joao felt a great imaginary weight collapse upon his shoulders.

“What can I do? I am poor. I have no money” he said.

“You’re coffee” said The 13th Apostle, grinning so that his lips peeled back over his massive white teeth, lighting up the room and the will to favour in the young boy.

The 13th Apostle took Joao again out of the auditorium and into a smaller room, passing many more that looked like an endless cavern of hallways that opened into large open areas, kitchens, bathrooms, small closets and many, many, many rooms.

They entered a small room at the rear of the complex. It was shabby, with poorly laid carpet that was pulled up and fraying on all the edges, no window and no circulation whatsoever with a small table on one side with a small computer; nothing flashy, just something old and functional and a gallon of water sitting open and collecting dust in the corner.

“This is my room” said The 13th Apostle, “this is where I spend all of my days, thinking and praying. I don’t have riches. I don’t have plush seats and big screen televisions. All of that; the comfort, I give for my disciples and for the millions of Christians in this world who need this. I have my work and my dedication to Christ. It’s not easy work, but it is my life and my love, it is my passion. People like us Joao, we are not meant to be comfortable in what we do. Our work is to save souls and sometimes we have to give a little more and for us, to take a little less for us to be able to do our jobs. What did you want to be when you were a boy?” asked The 13th Apostle.

“Useful” said Joao, thinking only in his mind of having spent the whole of his youth watching how his life should have or could have been from the retreat of a broken window or a loose slat, hidden from the haggard expense of his busied and burdened family.

“I wanted to be a race car driver” said The 13th Apostle.

The Apostle lifted his head lightly towards where the horizon might be sitting were they outside of these walls, flickered his left nostril like a hungered rabbit and feigned a light tear to almost look as if it might well in his eye and run down his cheek.

He cleared an imaginary lump in his throat and lifted his left palm into the air as if he were setting the stage for a burden to lift itself with heavenly wings and fly free from the weighing repression of his silencing obligation.

The two men stared pensively at the small table pushed against the wall and the small metal seat folded against it. Joao wondered how a man so big could sit at something so small.

“What we want or what we wish of ourselves is not always what god intends. But we must listen to his word and make best our promise to serve. Jesus is calling you now. Do you hear his word?” he asked.

“I think so, maybe. What is he saying?” said Joao.

“He wants you to help him, to build his temple, to send his message to the people” said The Apostle.

“He wants me to pray, to lead a service’ asked Joao meekly.

“He wants you to make coffee” said The Apostle.

Joao inhaled deeply as if trying to extinguish a fire in his belly, one set alight by his faith.

“For who?” he asked, feeling as if he had no choice.

The Apostle smiled generously again, this time to himself, keeping one of his hands clamped onto Joao’s shoulder, squeezing firmly and pushing the boy downwards in a strange and upsetting kind of dominating condolence.

“Let us put to test, the gift that god has given you” The 13th Apostle said, turning to Joao and taking his small, feeble hand in a firm, crushing grasp, almost swinging the boy like an empty bucket as he shook firm and with winning vigour.

As The Apostle’s hand enveloped his own, Joao sank into the nightmare of his doubts and fears and saw in his mind and felt against the smoothness of his skin, the coarse abrasion of The Apostle’s bitter struggle. As the prodigious man; in personality, stature and size, stood before him with the crooked corners of his mouth almost touching his dangly ears and his white teeth glimmering in the dull light of the small office, Joao thought only of the handshake this man had made with an impervious dark figure.

“Is the devil real?” asked Joao.

“He most surely is,” said The Apostle, “he is as real as you and I. Does that frighten you?” he asked.

“Yes, it does” said Joao.

The Apostle pulled Joao close to his chest.

“My son you have nothing to fear. You are in the house of god and now, you are one of his servants, one of his disciples. The devil cannot get your soul my boy, as long as it is with god, as long as it is with us, here” The Apostle said, but the only words Joao could hear in his mind were; ‘any price’, words that he kept hearing over and over; what anyone would do or what anyone would give for their desire.

“Grace, would you call in our guests” said The Apostle to his receptionist, almost breaking the tiny buttons on the phone with his club like finger.

Joao had a worried look embossed in his eyes. He looked like he were willing himself to run, but that he was outside of his own body, unable to enact his will; defenceless, submitting, servile.

“What did you see?” asked The 13th Apostle.

“What?” said Joao, as if pulled from suspicion.

“When you made my coffee. What did you see?”

An image flashed before him, one that set a storm of impassable dread in his mind that had him feel isolated and his protest, censured. He didn’t know what to say; that he had seen him, a man of god, The 13th Apostle, shaking hands with the devil? And that this man had promised to collect the soul of every man, woman and child as the any price that he was willing pay.

In his mind, this image lit up by flashes of lightning from the coming storm and the coming together of the two hands in concordance was met with the clapping of heavenly thunder, sounding out in dissention for what had just become.

What would he say?

“My apologies sir, your guests are here” spoke a small and tidy looking woman with a simple floral dress, cheap flat heeled shoes; her hair tied in a bob and; like a stray dog, dressed with the stricken look of poverty in her apologetic eyes.

The Apostle, with his eyes fated on Joao’s waiting for what truth the boy had to account for, lifted and shook his left hand, inviting the guests into the room.

“Welcome,” he said to the guests, “before we discuss investment, can I offer you a coffee?”

“Relax Joao. This is nothing different to what you normally do, except instead of showing them themselves, you’re going to show them something else” said The 13th Apostle.

Joao wanted to run, but he couldn’t voice his concern to his legs.

“How do you normally make it?” The 13th Apostle asked.

“I put my hands in the grains, I close my eyes and I see things and when I open my eyes again, it’s done” Joao said.

“Well you just do the same thing except I am going to tell you something and I want you to visualise that, I want you to see that and I want you to make them feel that, each of them, all the same” said The 13th Apostle convincingly.

“Ok” he said, wishing he had the gall to say the contrary.

Joao stared at the men and women who sat in a circle around a table, pointing their appropriated fingers at figures and statistics, shaking their heads in concurrence and abrogated disapproval. He couldn’t hear what they were saying because he had The 13th Apostle hunched over his shoulder, leaning close to the side of his face and whispering into his ear.

As his fingers swam through the fine dark powder; running past and through every grain, he visualised in his mind a sea of infinite sadness that swelled within him, its currents pulling him deeper than he had ever been, so deep that he felt that the infantine breath of which he clung, might surely be his last.

Every word from The 13th Apostle’s tongue sank him further and further until he was shipwrecked; weighed by such an incredible depression that spilled of him, the mount of his treasures, out into the open sea and his fingers picked at each one, placing them considerately into a filter before his reach.

Still, The 13th Apostle whispered more and more horrific truths and the more he listened and the more he imagined, the more Joao wept. He wept like he had never wept before, like no man had ever wept before and he felt as Judas must have felt, knowing the wrong he must do, for the love of his brother so that the Christian truth could avail; the sadness of becoming the true martyr of Christendom, the sacrificed lamb in Christ’s heart whilst being the eternal villain in his worship of his word, to service the lesson of love and betrayal to all of humanity.

Joao felt this kind of sadness and he wept as the truth laid itself bare before his eyes, shaped by The 13th Apostle’s words.

The men and women at the table; The Apostle’s guests, paid no mind to the suffering played out behind them as they toiled over superficial importances; those of greater magnitude and determinable effect than the upsetting of a poor boy.

Then, as an appalling, dismal image burned in his mind; making him scream in sheer terror and disbelief, The 13th Apostle released the tense grip on his shoulder, unrigging his finger tips from between his weak bones and lifting the anchor from his bed of woe.

Joao stood still in his body but he was shaking in his mind as if his soul had broken loose of its binds and was rattling about like a an old engine, held by weak and rusted spiritual screws and bolts, undone by some equivocal intention. He titled his hand and poured the boiling water over the grains and watered his surmounting grief as if from this saddened earth would flower some worth of kindness, hope and purpose.

The 13th Apostle whispered into his ear once more as his fingers worked their way through the fine white grains and an uneasy smile became Joao, becoming quickly, a widened grin that spread warmth and sunshine through his body and it grew with more bridging joy, stretching out the grief as his arms would do every morning when he stretched out his slumber and opened his eyes like a flower’s petals to kiss the morning sun.

“There, it’s done” he said, retracting his hands.

The