Tuesday 11 March, 2008

A cup of coffee



It was a strange dream.
She has never seen such a dream in her life.
A hot cup of coffee, fuming.
She found it difficult to drink, with fear of burning her soft lips.
Yet she took the white porcelain cup, putting index finger through the narrow hole.
To her surprise, she felt it cold. The cup did not convey the heated emotions of the fuming liquid inside.
‘How can the cup be cold?’
The cup trembled at the tip of her fingers, challenging the postulates of physical science.
‘This is against the laws of thermodynamics’.
It reminded her of the handsome physics teacher at the school classes who always boiled Newton’s laws inside his beautiful baldness.
‘Why should a cup of coffee drag me to my old lessons, I do not want to be a Newton’
But she felt the gravitational pull of her memories, from deep inside her head.
‘Atoms are active at nascent state’.
She thought about the science laboratory where nascent passions evaporated at the dark corners, then she was a collegegirl.
She lifted the cup up to her mouth. The coffee smelled different. It smelled like sulphur fumes, a habitual inhalation of the city life.
Felt like gasping, yes she was really gasping.
She was still holding the cup; and felt the narrow hole gently turning slippery, as if oil has spilled over it. She found it hard to balance it with her finger. It tilted around her finger, fell down and broke splashing the fuming liquid around.
‘Oh!’

She knew that she was no longer dreaming.
But she refused to open her eyes for she did not want to forget the soothing trance of the violet dream. She gently rubbed her slippery fingers on the woollen blanket and curved like a prawn waiting for another dream.