Coffee and Sugar

TWENTY FIVE

  “Get him down, get him the fuck down” screamed Charity, spitting out every word and holding herself under Joao’s feet, trying to lift him upwards.

  And every time she budged, his knees buckled and his hanging weight shifted and pulled and body hanged limp once more.

  “Why aren’t you doing anything? Do something, please” she pleaded to The Bishop.

  The Bishop was silent. He had no idea how to speak. He had no idea how to move his fingers. He stood there by his son’s hanging feet, looking up at his frozen halcyon expression and he said nothing.

  And he thought nothing.

  He just stared in disbelief.

  Charity fell to her knees; her head bowing down to the floor, tears flooding from her eyes and choking her throat. She and her reflection wished that he would move. Her blood felt so heavy and she spluttered through every bargain for him to blink his eyes or to move a muscle.

  Her head hung low and her body shook feverishly and her hands clung to Joao’s swinging feet and she couldn’t believe that it was true. He looked like an old branch, broken away by the wind, but still hanging in the air, waiting to fall to the earth.

  She cursed and she cried and she said sorry maybe a million times and a million times more, each time that she looked up to see his still eyes, looking out over the stretch of the city.

  Charity and The Bishop stood there, without definition, in their own way of desponding, while a son and a friend, hanged by his belt from a branch of an old tree.

  And from this height…