I poured the first cup at 6:13 a.m., dark as a cave and bitter as regret. My eyelids felt like wet paper towels stuck to my eyes, and my brain was running Windows 95. But the mug was warm in my hands, and after three gulps, I felt something click. A key turned in a lock somewhere deep behind my ribs.
And I thought: let’s write a story.
At first, it was a modest thing. A farmer named Burt and his chicken, Shirley, living quiet lives on a foggy hill. Burt talked to Shirley like she was a person, and Shirley laid eggs shaped like tiny hearts. It was sweet. Nothing weird yet.
But then I refilled my mug. Cup two. Stronger this time. More grounds than water, practically chewing it.
Burt found a key inside one of Shirley’s eggs. A brass thing with teeth like shark fins. He put it in his pocket, walked out of the coop, and suddenly there was a door in the middle of his potato patch.
I sipped again. Cup three. My hand jittered like a moth trapped in a jar.
The door opened into a hallway made entirely of teeth. Not human teeth. Chicken teeth. Which don’t exist. But in the story, they did, and they clicked like typewriters as Burt tiptoed through. Shirley followed, wearing a tiny miner’s helmet. Why a miner’s helmet? Because that’s what came to mind, and I was on cup three.
Then came cup four.
Now, Burt was in space. Orbiting a planet made of butter. He had a spaceship shaped like a shoe. Shirley had grown wings—not feathered ones, but dragonfly wings that buzzed like angry toasters. They were being chased by a tax collector who only spoke in riddles and smelled like old apples.
I drank again. Cup five. My eye twitched. My leg bounced.
Burt opened a drawer in the sky and found a map to the secret of everything, scrawled in mayonnaise. They followed it through a storm of bees made of fire and into a city populated entirely by forgotten dreams. One dream was a talking dog who only wanted a hug. I named him Chairman Fluff.
Cup six. A mistake. A terrible mistake.
Shirley turned into a cloud. Burt was now a hummingbird. Everything was purple. Not the colour purple, but the concept of purple. I tried to type, but all the words came out backwards.
My story was slipping through my fingers like spaghetti.
And then—crash.
Like a balloon popped in a quiet church.
My fingers stopped typing. My head sagged like wet laundry. The screen blurred. My body whispered, “Nap now.”
And just before the dark took me, I saw it. One last thing.
Burt, now a single bean in a vast, cosmic chili, winked.
Then everything went black.
I woke up four hours later with my face stuck to the keyboard, the mug empty, and my brain hollow as a drum.
No more coffee today. Probably.
The CJBuzz 