Taste

Reprieve; a guided hand knows where the land rears and where the seas part. It knows nowhere, although it extends from a place so vast and lost in space; that is where he can be found.

He ground the last of the coffee as if they had been the first coffee beans exported from Brazil. Fresh off the boat, they exploded under the crushing incising of the titanium blades, attached to a raging, screaming motor by a middle-aged Chinese worker in a factory. Fine powder went into a Corphala mug and it lay there, tepid and dry. Coffee. Someone's salary. Someone's morning pick-me-up-(and-stay-with-me-until-work-finishes). Not his. His was for someone else who needed the caffeine to stay awake. Orget (Orjay, for anglophiles) slept just fine and could now greet the day with someone else's drug. He poured the boiling water into the mug and watched the steam snake its way to just before his nostril vacuum. Still working properly. And with all the sheer momentum of the blades in the grinder and the suck of his lungs, he grinned last, before the unflattering glob of salivation collapsed onto the surface of the black, black sea - his present for the manager, his man-ager.