This story appears as part of our annual Halloween Fiction series on Sprudge. 

The morning began as any other. A steaming cup of coffee, the aromas washing away the dredges of sleep. Coffee was Joseph’s morning crutch, necessary to feel any semblance of lucid decisionmaking in the early hours. His coffee came from a countdown calendar, each windowed door providing a different coffee to try. A small note adorned the calendar: One Coffee Per Day For Best Experience. Joseph opened the first window, ready for a fun assortment of different coffees for the week. Today’s coffee, a light-roasted natural coffee from Guatemala.

Joseph took a sip, letting the bright, berry-forward acidity linger in his mouth. Acidic, tart, sweet cherries he scrawled in his tasting notebook. Flavorful, full-bodied, swimming in complex brightness. This was the first coffee of the countdown calendar, but he was excited for his upcoming brews if this first coffee was any indication of quality.

Heat from the summer heatwave seeped through the windows, through the walls, weighing down the air inside his home. Joseph regretted brewing this coffee hot, beads of sweat quickly converging into a steady stream down the side of his face. He needed a reprieve and the neighborhood pool seemed to be calling his name.

In a heat-induced daze, Joseph found himself standing poolside. Feet almost moving on their own, he waltzed in. And then, five seconds. Five seconds before the pain fully registered. Five seconds before he recognized that his skin was burning. Five seconds before the sound of his voice yelling cascading through his bleary trance-like state. Had Joseph taken five seconds to look around before stepping in, maybe he would have seen the spilled bottles of hydrocholoric acid sitting poolside and the caution tape he had haphazardly walked past.

___

The morning began as any other. After yesterday’s strange incident, Joseph allowed himself the luxury of a late start, having called off work to see a dermatologist at the urgent care doctor’s recommendation. Joseph pensively mulled over his burns as he brewed the next coffee. Today’s beans were a washed coffee hailing from Brazil.

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Joseph took a sip, savoring the crisp, clean nectarine notes. Nectarines, honey, brown sugar he wrote in his tasting notebook. He crossed out Nectarines replacing the descriptor with stone fruit. Satisfied, he closed the book, wincing as the acid burn across his legs briefly flared with pain. At least the coffee tasted good.

With his coffee out of the way, it was onwards to the day’s errands. He didn’t trust himself to drive and called a cab. Joseph scrolled through his phone in the cab, distracting himself with small news updates as they sprung across his feed. “Pandas To Be Moved to New Zoo” a headline read. Clicking deeper into the story on panda diplomacy and the expected boon to the local economy, Joseph felt himself drifting, the article on upcoming merchandise, education, and panda livestreams filling his head.

A screech, resounding crash, startled yell, and several very loud expletives. The car had collided with a crate of nectarines that had slipped from the cargo truck ahead of the cab. Joseph was thrown sideways directly into the door, hearing a sickening crunch as his arm absorbed the force of his sideways momentum. Searing pain flew up his arm and his vision flashed white before he lost consciousness.

___

The morning began as any other. That was what Joseph wished he could have said. Instead, he was only just now on his way back from the hospital after an overnight stay and a number of scans diagnosing a broken arm and some fractured ribs. Apparently some improperly secured fruit crates were the cause of his new pains from a bizarre stone fruit-caused crash.

His cab pulled up to his driveway and dropped him off. Donning a new cast, Joseph slowly staggered to his front door. Though his body ached to rest and sleep, his mind was too frazzled to succumb to slumber, and so Joseph began brewing a cup of coffee to calm his nerves and help fight the encroaching physical tiredness.

Joseph’s dominant hand had been broken in the car crash. Brewing with his non-dominant hand felt clunky and awkward, and the normally fluid motions of his pour were unsteady and precarious, worsened by the slightly nervous tremor, likely a result of the adrenaline still running through his system.

Lifting the cup to his lips, Joseph drank deeply. The cup was not pleasant. He was unsure whether it was a poor grind, his shakiness, or any other brew factor, but his coffee tasted astringent, vegetal, and incredibly drying. The dryness didn’t seem to stop — Joseph felt his mouth, his throat become drier and drier and drier. Determined to not let himself have his morning soured by a poor cup of coffee, he angrily tore open another window on the countdown calendar.

Joseph was almost frenzied at this point. He had a deadpan focus on the coffee grounds sitting in his dripper, tightly clenching kettle in hand. The coffee swelled as the initial drops of water began saturating the grounds, aromatics diffusing into the air and steam steadily rising above the bed of coffee. As he recalled the various events of the past couple days, Joseph could only feel increasing anger, anger rising, rising, rising like the water temperature inside his kettle.

How could he be on the receiving end of such terrible misfortune, of such unfortuitous circumstance? What had he done to deserve his current injured state of being? As the numbers on his scale climbed with the addition of water flowing, flowing from the kettle, rushing over the coffee, his thoughts became louder and louder, a torrent of screaming thoughts in his head. It was an obsession, a fixation to get to his cup of coffee, almost as if it would be some cure to relieve him of the ailments he was experiencing. Once again, Joseph lifted the new cup of coffee to his lips, drinking deeply. The taste on his tongue resounded of ash.

Tim Tran lives in Berkeley, California and is a barista at The Crown: Royal Coffee Lab. This is Tim Tran’s first feature for Sprudge.

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