Devin opened the back door of the café and let the old woman shuf­fle in before clos­ing  it behind her. The bag lady, glad to be out of the Feb­ru­ary cold, smiled weakly; her rheumy eyes flick­ing about to take in the room.

“Have a seat,” Devin said, ges­tur­ing at a wooden chair with black stains on the vinyl seat. The woman did not hes­i­tate, she dropped her blue plas­tic bags to the ground with a wet thud and sat.  She con­tin­ued to look around the room, not meet­ing the young man’s gaze. Her cheek twitched;  she mut­tered some­thing unintelligible.

“Would you like some­thing to eat?” Devin reached into one of the stain­less steel cool­ers and pulled out a slice of sponge cake. He held it out the old woman. She paused, wary, then one of her pale white hands reached out from the lay­ers of old jack­ets and sweaters to take the offered food. She sat there, chew­ing the food. Small bites, chew for a long time. Get all the fla­vor. Make it last.

Devin watched; she kept her eyes low, star­ing at the ground. “She remem­bers you, Mag­gie. Do you know that?”

The woman stopped chew­ing. Her gaze darted about the room ner­vously, look­ing every­where but at the man address­ing her. Devin stood and walked over to the slop sink where the large grinder sat.  He brushed the machine, clear­ing out the remains of yesterday’s grind. “She knows how hard it must have been. With your daugh­ter leav­ing like that. And with Frank dying so soon after the trial.”

The old woman sat stock still. Star­ing at the floor. Devin took out a metal­lic artic­u­lated hose and set it in one of the stain­less steel mix­ing bowls. He took a strip of duct tape from a roll above and fixed the hose in place. “How could you be expected to take on another bur­den? The food stamps barely fed you. And Frank, well…you know the insur­ance barely cov­ered the funeral. Where was the money going to come from?”

Devin turned and smiled com­pas­sion­ately at the bag lady. He brushed a lock of blond hair out of his face. “She knows you did the only thing you could.”

The old woman started to moan. She did not speak, she did not move. Some­thing like a sob escaped her throat. Devin crouched down in front of her, using his free hand to reach out and take her chin between his thumb and fore­fin­ger. She resisted him, look­ing to the side. “She under­stands. Even though she was just a baby, she under­stands why you did what you did…why you had to do it. ”

He stroked the old woman’s cheek softly with the back of his hand. She began to cry. Softly, then with greater vol­ume until her whole frame was wracked with sobs. Devin felt the grief, watched the pain sur­face. He guided her gaze to meet his.  This time, she did not resist. Her  eyes met his.

“She under­stands,” he said. “But she does not forgive.”

Devin plunged the pointed end of the hose into the old woman’s tem­ple. She shrieked, kick­ing and knock­ing Devin back­ward. Arms flailed weakly and legs kicked. Her face was a ric­tus of pain.

Devin stood and, steer­ing clear the thrash­ing woman, looked over at the bowl. A black ichor was drain­ing from the woman through the hose. As more of the wrong­ness flowed from the hose, the weaker the woman’s strug­gles became.

After about five min­utes, she was still. Her breath came in shal­low gasps. When the ichor stopped flow­ing, he took a towel from the dry­ing rack, pulled the noz­zle at her tem­ple. It came free with a wet pop­ping noise and he held the clean white­ness to the wound. Keep­ing the pres­sure con­stant, he sang the woman a lul­laby he’d heard when he was a child. Her breath sta­bi­lized until she was calm, as if asleep.

After a few min­utes, he helped her stand. She blinked but was oth­er­wise silent, her eyes scan­ning the room in a haze of con­fu­sion. He opened the back door, put the bags in her hand, and led her out into the cold. He met her gaze once more after step­ping back into the warmth of the café. She looked at him hope­fully from the alley. He smiled and shut the door.

By the time Devin returned,  the ichor was set­ting nicely. He took a spoon and stirred the dark­ness, break­ing it into smaller and smaller pieces until it was a bowl of small black beads, glistening as if coated with oil. He poured the beads into the grinder, set the dial for auto-drip, and let it run.

Author’s Notes  I was drink­ing Star­bucks cof­fee when I wrote this. Fit­ting. I can­not remem­ber where I first heard the phrase “Black as night, sweet as sin” to describe how a per­son liked their cof­fee pre­pared, but it’s always stuck with me. (It pre­dates Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys, so don’t you dare whip that quote out.).  In the fine tra­di­tion of fig­ur­ing out ways to make the world a weirder place, I wanted to write a story about where the higher-end cof­fees really come from. Orig­i­nally, the story was sim­ply called “Fresh Cof­fee” and had Devin col­lect­ing the tears of an inno­cent child to brew the cof­fee. The tone was all wrong, and did not address the the ori­gin of the beans.  Then I remem­bered that phrase, that won­der­ful phrase. What else would some­thing that the world loves as much as cof­fee be made from?  Sin, of course. The more griev­ous the sin, the darker the brew.  What did Mag­gie do, pre­cisely?  I leave that to you to decide. The best sins occur in the imag­i­na­tion, don’t they?

Christo­pher T. Miller

Christo­pher T. Miller is a soft­ware devel­oper by trade and a writer by neces­sity. He is one of the co-founders of Podiobooks.com and is the Over­lord of The Secret Lair. He has not yet been eaten by a grue.