Black Coffee

Imagine yourself waking up, as everyday, taking a big gulp of your favorite black coffee. However, one day is unlike others and you wake up to see the world swallowed by an expansive void... coffee.

The smell roused me so, and its nature spelled perfection in my eyes. An ambrosia so bitter and rash, yet pleasantly crisp with a seasonal hint of Umami and subtle sweetness, gifted itself to me every morning. It’s sweet nectar enhanced me day upon day and I drank in labored gulps: the strikingly harsh ichors of black coffee. Its ritualistic consumption etched its hold over my life and I found myself pleasantly awaiting the moment when my lips would reacquaint themselves with the seething liquid. Like a spell it would obediently enter my cup and eventually, usually is a matter of moments, run down my throat into the fires of my gut. Ahh, the sweet ambrosia, the gracious ichor, the grandest of all ales, gently working down my body and serving me. It was the purest of French imports, the Lavand Noir, the most expensive of its kind. No other brand understood me so, everyday gently rousing me from bed and setting me sweetly to it.

My days would begin and end as they always did; with the attitude of a molten king. I would drink my coffee black and sugarless, absent of creams and other additives that would drown the true nature of the pungent liquid. Few days would I need to shave or cut my hair; the powers of black seared both. Few days out of a year would I fall ill or contract the grave diseases that swept through the workplace; the magics of the liquid kept such nuisances in check. I had become like a nephilim.

Or so I was convinced, anyway.

One such day had come again. It had come again like so many days before it, yet I could not remember any day before that. Sands weighed in my eyes and I wiped them clean with the back of my hand; a simple gesture, so mechanical and so unfeeling as if programmed into me like a franchised machine. My mind swam for what seemed like years as I pulled myself from my coffin and slip into the depths of my linens. Like a typical day, like any other day, I leapt from my roost and stumbled like a mindless corpse to the grand machine that hung from the woods of my cabinetry. Out came the gracious liquid, merciful in its existence, until it filled the recesses of my cup and ran down the pipe that was my throat. It was customary to open my curtains at this time and gift the room with light, for only then could I endure the outside world once I have taken the black.

By the second hour I swept out the door, another cup of black in my hand, complete with its own carrying case and eight-hour temperature retaining mug, off to work. The day was shining and the neighboring buildings also opened their curtains to the shining light that pervaded the realm of modernism. I bound down those stairs, taking care not to spill my enchanted black liquid and hurried out of the sanctity of my dwelling and towards the train.

The day passed like any other, and when I downed the last of my Lavand Noir, I reached into my bag for more of the quality grounds and hurried to the break room to craft yet another marvelous batch. The smell wafted generously throughout the office and all employees, both drinkers and not, shared in the merriment that the harsh aroma induced. Ahhh, I said aloud, life has been restored.

Also of the customary assaults guaranteed by the office life was the engagement of camaraderie after work; the unprepared me nurtured my thirst throughout the day but little did I prepare myself for ostentatious outings through the nightlife of the city. My black was no more. I, along with my company of four others, spread to an Izakaiya at the edge of town where it was also customary to drink. I bespoke great bouts of laughter and chivalry, speaking of the densities of the workplace and the tidings of unmarried life. The cacophonous “enjoyment” soon wore on me, and I felt the veins in my hands and in my temples throb. I was dying inside, slowly and surely without my precious substance to fill the chasm of my gut. I knew the time had come, and I ordered a black coffee, perhaps the last black coffee that I’d ever order. Only now did I understand the grim implications of that last reprieve from the nightmare that awaited me.

I got a phone call. It was my fiance, the woman that I’d compare even my black with; her eyes not so different than the depths of my unfermented drink. She rang, but I took a gulp of my ensnaring black just before wrapping the ringing device to the shape of my square head.

“You call, I answer!” I answered whimsically, trying not at all to seem picked apart by my long spout of drinking with the office puppets.

“You promised you’d be at your apartment tonight. You promised you’d be here, but you’re not… I thought I mattered to you, but I guess that is a lie too.”

I panicked, but took another hasty gulp of my black to ward off any evil from my next words�"a trick I often employed in dark situations.

“No, no, of course not. I didn’t forget. I… I just needed to pick up some coffee, I was all out! I’ll be there in ten.”

I was always the best liar, and I felt extremely satisfied with my lie. When I ended that call and darted from the arms of my coworkers, I continued to believe that lie. I hastily bought a coffee at a vending machine and sprinted for where I believed my apartment to have been. I soon came around the buildings that flanked my dwelling and found with much difficulty the radiant form that had been my fiance. It had begun to rain now and the raindrops fell silently on her body, yet she waited patiently for my appearance. I grew more assured of my lie and I truly knew she suspected nothing. I was ingenious, a true warrior, a frontiering escape artist.

Then it happened, in the blink of an eye, my appetite for self-approval betrayed my very balance and as I climbed those many stairs to the second level of the units, my foot was caught on a loose tile and I fell forward. The hot liquid, that great ambrosia that I found so like an extension of my very arm, leapt from my hand expelled all other the surface of the drenched stairs and ran down their steps like the blood of a murder. The black liquid covered the stairs impossibly, and although it pained me to see the valuable honey waste down those steps, my haste quickly recovered and I proved to be resilient. That same haste quickly reunited me with my awaiting fiance, who brought me into her arms, seemingly unaware of both my lie and my blunderous fall on the stairs. I quickly took us inside, leaving the liquid to envelop the stairs and soon creep up the walls of the apartment. I played the fool and feigned not to notice.

I awoke that next morning with the feeling of dread. It was unlike any other I felt before, a new day as I first thought, but not one I was familiar with. It was indeed new, and I found myself rousing from the bed as I always did, stumbling forward in the most awkward of manners down the long hallway and through the living room of that rather spatial living adornment. I found myself walking with discomfort as I rubbed the remains of my visit from the sandman and lazily walked through the swampy carpets of my apartment.

Yes, swampy, and I jumped with a fright. In that darkness I realized that the floor was wet and soppy, and with each measured step I could hear the slosh and swish of a dastardly wetness. It was warm, even burning to the calloused flesh of my feet. I hurried to the kitchen where, even in the dim light of the kitchen lights, I witnessed the ground flooded with a thick and oozing black liquid. It was a liquid I had seen so many times before, and it was a liquid I’ve never seen in such excess, especially covering the entire floor of my apartment.

It was black coffee.

I hurried through the river of coffee and dashed as quickly as one could through such a raging river or burning coffee, throwing aside the curtains and anticipating the flood of sunlight to enter the room and espouse the meaning of this drowning world.

But there was nothing. Utterly nothing, except the reflection of my face on the panes of glass. The world was utter darkness, and I peered into its depths lost and confused. This was not the world I left just hours prior. It was an empty void, as if someone dropped ink over the glass itself and suffocated the holes. Like an octopus, angry in its capture, sought to grow ever larger and punish the world by blanketing its ink over the sky and blout out the sun.

Like black coffee engulfed the world, reducing it to an empty void.

In my horror, I peeled back from that window and bound like lightning to my bedroom where my fiance surely slept innocent and unaware.

“Wake up! Something terrible has happened! Wake up!” I roared from down the hall. When I finally reached that bed, I tore the sheet off of her slumbering form nestled perfectly in the shape of a woman, and I felt my heart escape from my chest.

I gasped at the horror.

There, in the position and perfect mimicry of my fiance, just as I thought to have left her, was a mound of ashy ground black coffee.

The expensive Lavand Noir…

Fin