Your First Cup of Soorj After the Death of Your Beloved Nana
Jolie Toomajan
Ingredients
1 heaping tablespoon of fine-ground coffee
1 demitasse ¾ full of water
1 tsp sugar
Nana’s favorite jazve, the one with the crack in the wooden handle.
☕︎
Pour the water, coffee, and sugar into the jazve and place it directly on the burner. Bring to a boil, then remove from flame until the boil settles. Place the jazve back on the burner and bring it to a boil again.
Scald everything accidentally and burn your thumb when you pour the finished coffee into the demitasse.
Spitefully dump in two teaspoons of sugar and then a third. Taste the coffee, which is, of course, too sweet. Finish it angrily and quickly while it is still hot enough to burn your throat, which will allow you to feel something. Anything.
Break the rules. Read your own cup.
Flip the cup over the saucer and hold it there for a moment. Expect to see roosters or hearts or little tongues of fire. Flip it back to reveal block letters carved into coffee grinds.
I AM SORRY, HABIBI
Put the cup down and realize there are possibilities here.
First, of course, is that it is not her at all; it is something far meaner and colder and you have already lost. Nothing will ever change the fact that something has come to you wearing your grandmother’s skin.
It could also be her. You could not have to suffer this loss at all.
See yourself at home watching movies with a coffee cup, in the bathtub with a lavender-scented bomb (her favorite flower), talking animatedly to a coffee cup resting on the shampoo rack.
Running off to the bathroom on dates to pull a coffee cup out of your purse and see what it thinks. Strapping it into a car seat next to you as you tell the coffee cup that you could really use this break.
Realize you have an option where you can be surrounded with her, that you could stop your life and always keep this pain one step away.
Be tempted.
Look back to see that the words are still there.
Pick up the cup, with the slashes of agrimony, pack it with crumpled wax paper into the nicest wooden box you have, and put it on a very high shelf.
Do not ever take it back down.
About the author:
Jolie Toomajan is a PhD candidate, writer, editor, and all-around ghoul. Her dissertation in progress is focused on the women who wrote for Weird Tales and her work has appeared in Upon a Thrice Time, Death in the Mouth, and Black Static (among other places). She is editor of Aseptic and Faintly Sadistic: An Anthology of Hysteria Fiction and the co-author of Posthaste Manor with Carson Winter. Despite all of this, she would investigate a clown hanging out in a sewer grate. You can find her anywhere @JolieToomajan
