A teacup of coffee.

This might be a scary story, or a crazy story, depending on how you interpret it.

(Image found on Pinterest and edited with Canva)

The nightmares, they were making a grand eleventh comeback. 

It was never the same dream, but there was one recurring element in all of them that was absolutely detested by Raven…

A teacup of coffee. 

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She woke up, all sweaty and out-of-breath. 

The fan above her bed rotated slowly, menacingly.

The baggy, black t-shirt that she had on was drenched and shrivelled into a sad little clump and plastered to her stomach and chest, and the almost-invisible, sky-blue coloured shorts that she wore underneath were stuck to her butt. Her dark, curly hair felt heavy on her head, so she gave them a toss with her hands to ease the tension.

She felt a bit dizzy, as if on a feverish ‘runner’s high’.

“Ah, they’re back”. 

She squinted and looked in the direction of her bedroom window, even with the curtains closed, you could tell that the sun was shining down mercilessly; a distant, droning buzz of the cicadas calling out to each other could be heard. 

She turned and bent down to look at the tiny hands on the vintage wristwatch which lay on her bedside table. 

10:23 AM.

“Ew. What the fuck kinda disgusting time is that? But now that I’m up…”

She groaned and violently rubbed her eyes to kill any last remains of sleep. Then flung off the bed, and in a mechanical order, put on her way-too-large-for-the-face pair of spectacles, tidied her bed and pushed aside the curtains. 

A heavy sigh was due, and she loudly let it out. 

Another day had begun, another night had ended, and the nightmares were back; the image of that teacup filled with coffee was still etched in Raven’s mind, like a stubborn little bitch.

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Raven was a writer, through-and-through, in its most clichéd sense. Not that she took on the avatar intentionally or on purpose, that’s just how she rolled.

She was an avid reader of every single imaginable genre of books. She often carried a small notepad and pen, even when she didn’t really need it. When she wasn’t working on a novel at home, she could be caught, deep in thought, earphones dangling from one ear, stirring a spoon in a tall cup of iced-tea, in about any given restaurant in the town, depending on what kind of food she wanted to indulge in on that day. She had a mature, but messy handwriting, and liked sending random letters for her best friend to interpret. She had a special place in her heart for profanity, and absolutely adored dark, senseless humour. She didn’t care much about fashion, but she had style. And just like her brain, her computer was filled with documents of incomplete, unfinished stories — some yearning for a middle, some searching for a beginning, and some waiting for an end. 

Now, I’m not suggesting that all writers are like this, or should be like this. Or that Raven was any weirder than them, or the same as them, or any normal-er than them. This is just how she was. A likeable, influential personality. 

One notable difference that she did have, though, was that Raven disliked coffee. She had always heard from other writers about how they needed to be caffeinated to write, or how their imagination was fuelled by coffee. But not Raven. She couldn’t stand the mud-coloured drink. Its smell nauseated her. This was also the reason why she never hung-out in cafés, a thing that many people found peculiar.

More on that later, for there’s some things you need to know first.

Raven wrote horror stories. Ghosts, ghouls and all the spooks. It was all thanks to the nightmares.  

She had been having these nightmares ever since she was a kid. They were not continuous though, there were dry phases between the episodes, this had happened eleven times so far (counting the previous night). 

When did they start? Why did they start? Raven had no clue, she had never given it much thought. They had always just been… there. And were now a part of her.

As I hinted earlier, they were the main plot-generating machine for her horror stories, and in that sense, she found an odd comfort within them, as if they were there to help. 

Sometimes she rationalised: 

“Do the nightmares not go away because I’ve unknowingly become dependent on them to write my stories? Or has writing always just been a coping mechanism to deal with them? Maybe I wanted to desperately believe that they’re not really real, so I started writing them down as fiction stories… the nightmares are not for my writing, the writing is because of my nightmares?”

But she brushed that thought away and shoved it under the depths of her mind, like you would shove a pile of dust under a sofa or a carpet. 

Anyway, back to the teacup of coffee. 

For some bizarre reason, her terror-dreams always featured this element. 

It was a teacup like any regular teacup. Off-white in colour, with patches of red paint on its rim and bottom, a green handle, and a painted picture of a solitary flower with green leaves sticking out from its sides; the teacup was accompanied by an ochre-coloured saucer. Another thing was that it was always filled with coffee — how could Raven so certainly tell it was coffee?, you might ask — well, because she could smell its strong, overpowering scent.

To her, the teacup of coffee was just so… ordinary. Just resting there, sometimes on a gorgon’s head, sometimes in an apparition’s hand, just resting there in a silly way, and staring at her. 

The only offensively normal thing in a grotesque wonderland. 

“It’s mocking me, it’s questioning me”, Raven argued, “as if to say, “Wake up, don’t you know this is not okay? You’re not okay”. And I don’t appreciate that very much”. 

Oh how she hated its egotistical normalcy with all her being — it totally ruined the beautiful, bloody, cruel scene that was playing itself in her dozed-out brain — but also laughed to herself from time-to-time at the irony of that notion.

Why didn’t she just stop thinking about it? That’s easier said than done, have you ever not liked something so much that you couldn’t help yourself from obsessing over making it go away but it just ended up being all the more in your face (or nightmare) no matter what? Exactly. 

So she kept trying to come up with ways to get rid of the teacup:

“What if I will myself to get it broken in the nightmare, you know, just fall and crash? Or disappear? Or get crushed under something? Or fly away, never to return?”

But it just wouldn’t, the stubborn little bitch. Although, there was one obvious method that she still hadn’t tried-

“Are you ready to order?”.

“What?”.

Raven had become so entangled in her own thoughts, she had forgotten that she was sitting inside the new burger place that someone had recommended her to try. 

The waitress, an attractive girl with sharp features, athletic build and tattooed arms, had come up to her table. 

“I must have zoned-out and not realised that I have been hogging this table without getting food for a long time.”

“Oh, yeah… uh, give me five minutes”.

“Sure”.

Raven whipped out her notepad and pen, and started writing: 

“The nightmares, they were making a grand eleventh comeback. 

It was never the same dream, but there was one recurring element in all of them…”

“Hey! Can I place my order now?”, she called out, as she continued to furiously scribble down her words.

P.S. Like what you read?