Ruben Mecho Sanguesa

THE COFFEE MAKER


“No way” cried Julianne while she stared at her beloved boyfriend Jason,
 
“I won’t phone Bernadette to ask for forgiveness, I did not do anything”
 
“I know honey, but you know how she is, especially after the…” added Jason
 
“Enough” she interrupted with such a coldness that could even cut the heavy air sickening the room.
 
Julianne was not that kind of girl with bossy behaviour, in fact she was the opposite; what she did not tolerate at all was hypocrisy. She had a sip at her coffee which by the way was getting a bit cold and she frowned as the black liquid stained her teeth. She placed the coffee back to the small table beside them and sighed in relief to have ended such a disturbing conversation. Jason approached and caressed her black curly hair and gazed her so deeply that could almost guess what she was thinking of
 
“A penny for your thoughts” he whispered while he timidly smiled.
 
Julianne grinned and hugged him fiercely. She felt protected whenever she was with him, she was not a delicate woman actually nevertheless she needed Jason’ s support as the flowers need the sunrise every morning to live on. She was slim but not skinny and sport was her passion. She had reached first positions in athletics which you could tell by the amount of trophies in the shelves. Jason, on the contrary, was not a very competitive man, he was not a sportive guy but made it up for his ability of activeness that Julianne needed. They were like an old coin, having its two non-separable faces: the one offering restlessness and vividness and the other one providing calmness and humour sense .
 
“Hey, I’m gonna go to have some sleep, It’s gonna be a hard day tomorrow, Paris is not just round the corner, so as to speak!” he suggested.
 
“don’t abuse on coffee, you know that it will not do any good to your nerves, in fact, you know what George said…”He kissed her forehead and leaded upstairs.
 
Julianne just nodded and finished her black coffee with a disgusting gesture. She started to think about her childhood in France while she heard her other half steps climbing up the stairs and getting far and far away; her thoughts were only disturbed by the cracking sound of the old ceiling as Jason walked in. she made sure the tickets were in a safe place and decided to literally crawl the stairs to join her partner and leave herself in Morpheus arms.  The tic tac coming from the alarm clock made her feel uncomfortable, in fact, that sound started to hammer her head like a medieval harsh torture machine. She rushed clumsily to the closet and took two sleeping pills. After that all that anguish and anxiety blurred and her eyes closed to welcome the next morning.
 

 
Julianne opened her eyes, one after the other, so slowly that she seemed to be coming back to life after she had died. She yawned lazily and stretched her right arm to touch Jason to make sure he was right next to her, but not in a physical way, she had always wanted him beyond his body, she fed on his positivity toward life, his maturity and his calming taps on her back when she had a bad dream or whenever she lost her temper with her sister Bernadette which happened very often. Julianne believed in destiny, in a supernatural force that controlled everything, she believed in God, but an individual God that, according to Julianne, had a plan for all of us, a plan that sometimes could be as sour as the last goodbye to that person who we adore or on the other side of the coin, a plan that may be as surprising and astonishing as we had never imagined.
 
She opened her eyes totally and spent a couple of seconds looking at the old ceiling, which made her realize needed to be redecorated. She turned to her Jason with a huge effort to fight laziness and overcome that feeling and kiss his back. To her surprise, the bed was empty and cold, she stood up in a sock looking at the lonely bed in the distance. It was seven in the morning and everything was dark, she could only hear the trees moving being hit by the morning wind.
 
She gasped and called her husband: “Ja are you downstairs?”
 
Silence was the only guest in the room at the time
 
“Honey, you know I don’t like these things, I do not like jokes, you know me” She desperately claimed.
 
She put on her night gown and headed to the stairs, she climbed it down little by little and with such a fear in her eyes that could tell she was in real pain. She did not cease on repeating Jason’s name on and on but any response was obtained. Her heart was beating hard like an old coffee machine being almost ready to spit out the black coffee. She finally got to the kitchen, which was just beside the end of the old stairs, and wandered around like a lost puppy searching for its owner. A tear dropped on the kitchen table as she sat and tried to organize her thoughts.  Only the rumbling of the fridge did not seem to stop since all around her seemed to be in calm, an odd calm that made her feel restless, her breath speeded up more and more like a long distance train arriving at its destiny . she opened the third drawer and took the inhaler, put that damned gadget in her lips and inhaled making her best to get the most of it, making her best to recover from that anxious moment she was suffering from. She closed her eyes, and just breathed gently. Memories came to her head, when children at the school teased her and hit her and she depended on that little grey object to restore peace in her soul and her body. Bernadette had always pitied her and defended her sister against cruelties.
 
“Berni, why do we have to play cat and dog?, If I could just tell you how I feel, If I just…”
 
A tremendous noise interrupted that moment of meditation and took the uncertainty and fear back to her eyes. It seemed to come from the main door. She pushed her chair back and went to the sitting room to figure out what it was. She walked slowly but firmly towards the door. Once there, she asked in a trembling voice: “Is somebody out there?” No response at all did she get. She touched the door handle for a while and stepped back, something told her that it was not a good idea to open that door. She energetically picked the phone and dialed her boyfriend’s number. It was switched off. She felt completely alone. She started to cry silently, and tried to recall Bernadette’s number as she dried her chin with her left hand back. She eventually dialed Berni’s number but she did not answer it. The situation was becoming overwhelming for Julianne.
 
Suddenly the main door opened, Julianne dropped her phone on the white coffee stained carpet with horror, she hid behind the kitchen door and did not utter a word, actually she would not have been able to say even the easiest word in that situation. She just waited hoping that the stranger just left, but unfortunately he did not mean to do so; he just locked the door behind him and said something aloud.
 
“he is not alone in the house” said Julianne to herself “what does he want from me”? even worse, “what do they want?” Julianne tortured herself with that sudden question. That moment brought so hard memories to her, just like when she was in third grade and hid in the school library to get rid off her classmates jokes and cruel comments on her. That is why she grew stronger, she built up a shield made of courage and braveness that was half vanishing in that precise moment. She peeped through the door and could not see the strangers, she was only able to distinguish the reflections of her trophies on the dinning room mirror. She closed the kitchen door hoping that those disturbing strangers just disappeared .
 
After several seconds of silence, seconds that longed for an eternity for her, she heard the strangers talking in the dinning room, she could not make a word of what they were saying. She put her ear against the door at the time she grabbed the cross she wore in her neck with a last hope to understand what was happening and the most important thing: what their plan was. She started to notice that the kitchen door handle turned to leave the strangers in. she was terrified, however, she gained strength as she pushed the door with all her forces, she said to herself: “God has a plan for everything, He won’t let that something horrible happens to me”. As she said those words to her, she was not as convinced as she used to be that all was going to be okay, she desperately opened the second drawer, just beneath where she hid the exhaler, and took a knife with her. She was feeling dizzy and confused as if she was living in a nightmare, a bad dream that she was trying to escape from and wake up. She held her knife tight and a cold shiver ran all over her spine. The intruders were going to get into the kitchen and there was nothing she could do to stop it, well, there was something.
 
The door finally opened and a blurry feminine figure entered the door extending her long arm trying to touch Julianne’s shoulder. The strange figure told Julianne something but she was so nervous and confuse that she could not understand anything, she just raised her hand holding the sharp knife and stabbed that woman in her neck. Loads of red roses flooded the room, roses that turned immediately into seas of bood staining the kitchen walls and door. Julianne cried as she had never had to defend herself in such a way, her heart was beating like it was going to explode and her cheeks were blushing and becoming as red as hell’s fire itself.
 
A fraction of second later, a masculine screaming could be felt in all the house, George was astonished in horror as he held Bernadette’s body in the floor. Nothing could be done to help the girl without life in the floor. Julianne dropped the knife in the floor, totally and utterly confused. George has been her doctor since two years ago, since Julianne forgot to take her medication and killed her husband Jason by accident one summer night after a big discussion between them, hallucinations were part of her daily life and Dr. Logan volunteered himself to take care of Julianne after the terrible night. Julianne spent a year of her life in a mental hospital but Dr. Logan’s suggestions about keeping her at home to get healed were finally taken into consideration. He made his best to make her feel like nothing had happened, he even treated her like his daughter since he was very close to Jason, his best friend in college.
 
Julianne thought she had overcomed all her problems, she even thought she could bear a normal life, she even skipped medication and did not obey George at all.
 
Now Julianne was giggling in the kitchen floor, covered in blood, looking at George with a nervous smile and not even being able to notice Bernadette’s corpse on the floor. She left the knife on the floor and stopping her giggling she looked at George and said: “Who are you? What have you done to my beloved Jason”?
 

 
The end
 

All rights belong to its author. It was published on e-Stories.org by demand of Ruben Mecho Sanguesa.
Published on e-Stories.org on 03.01.2012.

 
 

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