Coffee and Sugar

by C. Sean McGee

TWENTY FOUR

  From this height, Joao could see over the entire stretch of the city and at that moment, it all looked so magnificent and so very busy and the spaces between everything seemed so incredibly small.

  From this height, the cars and the trucks and the buses and the motorbikes and the taxis and the rattling old Beetles were no longer fraught or final, they all looked quaint and so benign and orderly and the people and their demeanors and their children and their dogs and their guns, they too seemed less of a menace.

  They all seemed so minute and charitable.

  From this height, he could easily see the church, and he noticed a small hole in the roof that probably could have been fixed weeks ago had he or The Bishop bothered to find the source of the leak.

  From this height, the world hardly made a sound. He could hear the light buzzing of taxiing helicopters in the distance, circling over tall sky scrapers and jostling for space in the murky sky.

  He could just hear; from this height, the dull rumble of an airliner far off near the thin line of the horizon and he could just hear; at this height, a small mosquito buzzing about his right ear of which he felt no bother to slap away.

  From this height, it was hard to hear anything over the echo of his last held breath.

  It’s hard to say for sure how Joao was feeling from this height, but I can tell you, he wasn’t scared or sad or angry or despondent. But if I did have to describe what was going through his head, I guess I’d say he felt relieved.

  And he sure was pretty quiet about it.

  From this height, there was a specific sound to silence.

  And from this height, he could see Charity, tripping over her every desperate step as she ran towards him, reaching out for something in the air that was always just out of her reach and she was screaming something, but from this height, he couldn’t hear that the something she was screaming was his name and he couldn’t tell that the something she was reaching for, was him.

  And from this height, he could see that The Bishop had been taken by a pawn.