Coffee and sugar

ignoring the eye that was gnawing away at the back of his head.

Joao moved from house to house and at every door he was met with defensive rage and the clamor of hostility but at every door, he quietly kneeled to the floor and slid part of every napkin through tiny gaps in their doors, leaving a small tail of white flicking in the light breeze so The Bishop himself could see that Joao had tried.

But try as he may, Fatts was right.

The people who frequented this hill came here with the intention of bedding with sin, not cleansing themselves. Here they could exercise the demons that itched at their moral skin, begging to burrow into their domesticated hearts where it would split the fiber of their being should they not pick it from their sweaty pores and vanquish it in drunken orgiastic splendor upon the black veil of night. This was where the foul beast was abetted to stretch its legs, to run free and to have no worry.

These souls were not to save. They were being saved and the whores who hobbled about with infection drawn upon their skin and tragedy upon their youths were merely cunting priests whose moral servitude was to invite the devil between their thighs and gaping mouths and to swallow whole; like an open drain, the residue that built upon normal men, threatening to colour them badly, of which they must scrape off of their skin and cleanse the avenues of their minds in a storm of debauching indecency.

The whores were tainted angels and the drunks, the junkies, the perverts and the estranged, they came here to pray. Their lives may have been better for it; their children more loved, their wives more endeared, their neighbours more acquainted and the rules of social standard and heavenly tenure, more adhered.

But behind some of these doors; the one’s that conspired with secrecy and were weighed with heavy locks, were the ones who made their homes in this refuse, having no choice but to shut their eyes as they washed their skin in the run off of human degradation, keeping a silted eye open as their heads sank into their stained mattresses and their ears fought to silence the whoring 140