Lords & Ladies of the M'Verse: An Ooorah Anthology

Day 13 - AngusEcrivain's The Burning Bush

The Burning Bush

by AngusEcrivain

A Brief History Lesson

Narrated by Morgan Freeman

Like most people or at least, like most people who like a little caffeine in their coffee despite the fact it's a banned substance, I'm willing to pay what to the vast majority of citizens would likely be classed as an astronomical sum of money for a jar that'll make three decent-sized mugs at best.

Thing is it's not even nice coffee. I mean it. It's fucking rank.

The buzz though, that caffeine high... That indescribable feeling that washes over me and calms me... Yeah, it's worth it for something that tastes worse than a homeless man's armpit.

Knowing all of that I wouldn't be surprised if you called me a junkie.

Well, fuck you.

I mean yeah, it's true enough to say I'll pay more than it costs to buy a two-bed semi in Basingstoke and I'm in no doubt at all that if you held a jar of coffee in front of me and told me the only way I could get at it was to sleep with your long-dead grandma that I'd be all up in that rotted corpse quicker than you can say, "Hey, dude. I'm just messing!" but fuck you. If that makes me a junkie I don't give a shit.

This story isn't about me though. It's about... coffee...

There was a time when all throughout the Multiverse, coffee houses were the places to be seen. The branded franchises were hugely popular but soon, folk realised they could get a better cup of coffee at any one of the millions of independent houses.

It wasn't long, only a couple of decades or so which really isn't at all long in the grand scheme of things, before everything that needed doing was getting done in coffee houses.

Stocks were bought and sold, contracts were signed, songs were written and babies were conceived.

And therein lay the problem. When every other building on every street was a coffee house, the Coffee Wars were inevitable.

People were genuinely killed as coffee houses waged war upon each other, the proprietors of said venues acting more like military generals than baristas.

And so the Law was passed and the populace was forced to go cold turkey...

Fucking De-Caff

Not Narrated by Morgan Freeman

"I can't do it, man," said Steve, his bottom lip quaking and his eyes twitching as the mother of all caffeine headaches attacked the inside of his noggin. "I just can't take it any more."

"Hold it together, bruv," said Simon, Steve's younger brother. His head was killing him, too. So painful was it that he thought his brain might escape through his ears, at least that's exactly how it felt. "We're gonna' hit the storage facility tonight and procure some of that Gold Blend before it makes it to the incinerator, all right?"

"I know the plan, Simon. Gah!" Steve's yell was accompanied by the rapid movement of his hands to the sides of his head and he squeezed as hard as he could, applying particular pressure to his temples, in an effort to make the voices that were currently screaming, "Coffee!" to shut up.

"Do you want a de-caff?" Simon asked, kindly. He felt so bad for his brother, man who'd been a bigger coffee drinker than anyone he knew. "I know it's not the same, bruv, but maybe it'll trick your mind into thinking it's satisfied for twenty minutes or so."