It was once like never before, because if I hadn't been, I wouldn't have told my story. I was born in a small town in Portugal, from the hands of a porcelain craftsman - hands that are as hard as they are soft in the curling of the fingers. I wouldn't be displaced by plastic (improperly said, by the way) but I would say that their epidermis fell in love with porcelain in the moments of my making. I made eyes in a set of 6 sisters, all hard as diamond to touch and sensitive as crystal to break. I found out the first part on my skin. The last part on the skin of my last sister, who lived the least - from the box to the first table I ever saw. Yes, this is an atypical story, in which Praslea declines to be feminine and declares her death in the prologue. After this first trauma, I lived in a terror of caution and a perpetual panic of the imprudence of men. I always tried to move by a millimeter, when I could see that it could save my life, without them noticing. For a cup of coffee, that's a blind act of suicide. If you make a man see your movements, you're like broken. On small and smooth wooden tables, from senile or choleric hands, I fantasized as much as I could the fatal moments.
Once I jumped in the air and got caught a short distance from the ground. Our hearts were in our throats - both for me and the 9-year-old boy, who had been warned in advance not to touch any of the cups. He opened his mouth in a kind of silent gasp. He couldn't say anything, poor thing, he was just digging his own hole. Who would have believed that, in addition to grasping the apple of Eden, the apple also writhed by itself through the air, like a tormented circus, before sucking the air above the earth? That boy kept his eyes on me. Shut up. He sat me nicely on the table and then kept staring at me from his mother's side. I wanted to give him a present and I moved a little further. I think he deserved to know he wasn't crazy.
After years, I saw him enter the room - a man in all his nature - and begin a heated conversation with our master, an old man of about 50, who was fond of strong drinks. Not Celsius. Nor Fahrenheit. But one of those that I drank only if someone ordered an Irish Coffee. After much debate and clapping, Tase produced a thin stack of large bills and the old man took his chair and lowered the dusty box from the cupboard. He took all 4 of us, as many as we were. When I opened my eyes again, I was in a room like I've never seen before, on the biggest table I've ever sat on in this world. Tase had a beige shirt and bulging eyes like a pug. He was looking at us, seated in an Indian row, each at the edge of a checkerboard square drawn on the surface of the wood. He didn't even know if he remembered well, if he had just lived the fables of a child, or if I was even still there. But he kept staring at us, pupils dilated in brown irises.
I didn't do anything then. I saw that the others were looking at me with disgust, feeling that I would like to do what is completely forbidden for us. But they didn't know it wouldn't be the first time. For days on end he kept us there and kept looking at us from his desk behind the typewriter. In the end he gave up and blasély signaled to the guy who was taking care of the rest of the dishes to take us from there.
The next morning, one of us ended up holding his coffee. And then, in the evening, when there was no one else there, he began to tell us the magnificent sensation he experienced. That he has never felt such coffee before. I waited in silence for my turn, and by the third day I was sitting on the desk, on a spotless stainless steel tray, in front of him. I flared my nostrils and smelled from a post office that an indescribable sensory delirium was to follow. As it was, by the way.
He poured the roasted coffee on me, it burned me, but it didn't burn me. What was a whole bean, perfectly ground a few minutes ago, filling me, in that unmistakable burn, that I've relived every morning at 7:30 ever since.
Because I was going to get out of the hatch again. And I had to dance a little. Enough to orgasm from coffee, day in and day out, for the rest of my life.