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Flavored Coffee

Ciara M. Blecka

    She drank flavored coffee at midnight.

    “It helps me sleep,” she said. I knew she had nightmares. The coffee was the thing that charged her up like five grams of cocaine and chased away the Sandman who brought nothing but grief and ruin. The dreams came after the fire. It was her ex-husband that had started it. He had been trying to kill her. She drank tea back then. Decaffeinated green tea and she slept like an angel. Not anymore, though. She was always up pacing the length of the hallway, her eyes darting back and forth as if she were looking for him, looking for a flicker of a flame out of the corner of her eyes. Later she would sleepwalk down the halls, talking despite her fitful slumber, and I would follow her, trying to piece together the fragments of the terror that haunted her. Walking, always walking, it seemed the coffee wouldn’t let her racing mind slow down enough and her feet were always trying to catch up.
    “John, it’s too late,” she would howl, her voice ghostly and strained.

    Why was it too late? What had happened in this cursed house? The curtains that hung from the windows were still dingy and covered in soot from the fire and hardwood floor still charred. I could still smell the scent of ashes when I caught my breath chasing her.
    “There is nothing we could have done,” she would whisper under her breath. “I swear, nothing I could do. Don’t kill me, too.”
    Who had died in this house and what had John tried to burn away? I knew Marissa had been happy once. I had seen her smile that day at the beach when the waves rolled in and she sat under the yellow umbrella brushing her long sandy brown hair back from her face.
    “God knows his face,” Marissa would say—often—in her sleep. There would be sweat beaded on her forehead and when she woke at dawn she would drink coffee and her hands would shake.
    One evening I accidentally left an oven mitt on the burner and Marissa put a pot over it, turning the burner on. There was a terrible fire, the flames licking at the walls behind the stove and setting the whole kitchen ablaze. The smoke billowed throughout the house and Marissa ran for the guest bedroom, choking and sputtering with tears streaming down her face. She threw open the door and inside instead of a guest bed, there was a child’s painted white wooden crib, charred and broken with a colorful mobile swirling above it, still playing an odd eerie song in the still static air. Marissa covered her face.
    “You have a baby,” I breathed.
    “I did,” she said numbly. “But it died. Drowned. In the tub. I was only away for a minute. And then John set fire to the place. He didn’t think we deserved to go on living. Maybe we didn’t. Maybe we should’ve burned. Burned in hell for our mistake.”
    After that, Marissa drank a different flavor of coffee. “It helps me sleep,” she said. And her face would be pale as she stared into the flickering fireplace, watching the flames, imagining the house burning and drowning in the flames.

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