A Tense Mug
Three Flash Fictions about the conflict and tension of my black coffee mug.
“Next!” the barista called to the long line of customers filling the coffee shop. “NEXT!” she shouted irritably in the crowded, sweat smelling cafe.
“What are you going to have?” she asked, eyebrows furrowed in the summer heat as the air-conditioner failed yet again.
“Americano, black, no ice,” the man said, holding out his mug with a credit card nestled inside. The barista eyed the card and clenched her teeth, reluctantly taking the card out of the mug and running it for the man.
“Well, we don’t have any ice,” she let slip. Luckily for her the man was too deaf to hear him.
Handing the coffee mug off to the next barista, she yelled out impatiently, “NEXT!” The next barista grabbed the mug in quick fashion, banging it into the coffee machine.
“Be careful with that, it’s an antique!” the old man said angrily to the young girl.
She rolled her eyes, grabbing another drink and placing it into the queue. The old man’s black mug filled to the brim with espresso as the machine malfunctioned, spewing boiling coffee all over the counter, the floor, and her apron. Screaming in pain, the barista drew the attention of everyone in the boiling cafe. In her excitement she knocked the mug off of the machine. It fell to the floor with a hideous thud. The old man’s heart stopped as he heard it hit the floor and expected the high pitched explosion of porcelain shards.
Grabbing his chest, the old man fell backwards into another customer, who in turn fell into the stand of display coffee mugs, all equally bland and monochrome gray. As they toppled from the display, one by one, they exploded into happy shrapnel as they no longer had to bare the brunt of being boring.
The old man lay gasping for breath on the floor in front of the coffee line, his coffee mug lay on the floor of the kitchen, and the coffee shop froze in the terror of a midsummer heatwave chaos.
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“COFFEEEEEEEEEE!!!”
The sound echoed through through the empty room.
“COFFEEEEEEEEEE!!!”
Someone walked into the room with heavy steps of caution and curiosity.
“COFFEEEEEEEEEE!!!”
The sound reverberated through the glass cabinet and smashed into the person’s ear. They stumbled backwards in shock, searching with wide eyes for the origin of the shrill, yet booming words. The panes in the cabinet rattled in jealous rage:
“COFFEEEEEEEEEE!!!”
They turned in utter horror, stumbling over themselves in attempt to gain a footing and flee as their mind struggled to grasp the incoherent situation.
The glass shattered free of it’s imprisoned state.
“COFFEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!”
A black coffee mug rocketed toward their face.
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Each and every day, like a zealot to an arcane god of consciousness, I wake up, put coffee grounds into the machine, fill it with water, wait, and then pour the finished product into my mug. The body of the mug doesn’t really matter to me, it is the soul, the perfect essence of the container for the coffee that the mug embodies that is it’s true form.
It searches for me. In angst and jealous rage the supreme being of the mug yearns to be filled with it’s soul, the distilled black nectar of jewels from living beings born from the Earth itself.
The mug reaches for me, searching for its perfect form. My friends gift me mugs, but the perfect form rejects them, throwing them down to the ground in crashing and uncaring crescendo of ultimate authority. The mug’s perfect form calls into question all, testing all, guiding my life and my hand, directing me to people who only gift me more coffee mugs!
I cannot escape. No matter where I go there is the echo of shattering imperfections as the perfect essence of the mug hunts me down until one day it will claim me as it tests me and I fail the test of being the perfect mug.