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Coffee

Since I was a young boy I have been a dab hand at fixing coffee, and just after my eighteenth birthday I take up a part time job in a trendy café down by the water treatment plant. The café is quite busy, especially around one o'clock, when hordes of sweaty sewage technicians and desalinization engineers burst steaming through the door and order sandwiches, salads, pies and other delicious goodies. I can prepare an espresso in around ten seconds, a cappuccino, thirteen. I am kept on my toes for a solid hour, fixing the many permutations that exist for a cup of coffee, and at two or two thirty I retire, spent, to the back alleyway, where I smoke a cigarette and partake of my own cup of coffee on my one and only break. My coworkers rarely join me, considering me strange, but they show a grudging respect for my expertise at injecting hot water with coffee beans.

I am asked to stay back late one Friday evening for the end of week cleanup. We give everything a thorough disinfecting, including the coffee machine itself, into which we pour some kind of noxious liquid which, I am told, can kill a small child with even the slightest skin contact. I am told stories of cocky waitresses rendered into a seething mass of bubbling flesh and bone after spilling this liquid on their shoes.

Everyone leaves and I am left to lock up. One of the main pleasures in my adolescent life is the thrill of masturbating in a strange and sacred place, and I waste no time in switching off the lights, dropping my pants, standing behind the counter, and ejaculating furtively into a Styrofoam cup. Then I heft a thirty kilogram bag of premium Brazilian beans, lock up, and cross the road to the town reservoir. Alas, the gate is firmly sealed, and I am forced to heft the bag of beans over the razor wire, where it lands with a plastic crunch on the other side. Then I climb over, using my jacket to protect my delicate coffeemaker's hands from the sharp and rusted edges. Once over, I drag the bag to the fluoride insertion pump and, unscrewing the heavy hatch, proceed to dump approximately twenty thousand premium Brazilian beans into the town's water supply. I watch with a fixative smirk as the water turns from clear to brown in the milky twilight. Coffee prepared for breakfast the next morning is six times the usual strength, and there are reports of massive traffic pileups on the main roads, early morning commuters twitching fatally from one lane to the next.

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