Black Coffee.

“What the hell is that smell?” I thought to myself as I paged listlessly through a brain-numbing ‘glossy’ that I bought from the news stand along with a cup of brown liquid. Coffee they called it.

It was hot. It was liquid. It was not coffee.

I could never understand why people would spend their hard-earned money to read about some starlet’s latest failed relationship and who got snapped getting out of a limo wearing a mini skirt and no underwear. Does Gucci not make g-strings?

Reading, or at least pretending to read, this drivel was only slightly more entertaining than trying to decipher the graffiti that adorns every flat surface of this train station. Once a beacon of togetherness and prosperity, the Gautrain had gone the way I always knew it would, to shit. 20^th century hieroglyphs are not my thing.

What is that smell?

 I snapped out of my thoughts just in time to look up and make a split second’s worth of eye contact with a young girl that sat down between me and the smelly homeless guy to my right. I was pleased she came along. She formed a much-needed barrier between me and homeless guy. He smelled like a chemical spill over manure and he kept mumbling something about ‘tuppety taleev’ (or at least that’s what it sounded like between the coughing up of phlegm). Whatever he had in that Styrofoam cup was obviously not doing him any good. ‘Try the coffee’, I thought.

Tuppety taleev.

It smells like. . .

She was a sad-looking girl from what I could tell in that split second that I had to examine her face. Her cheeks were blackened, whether from wept-off mascara or bruises, I could not tell. A sweet smile on a dirty face framed by blonde hair. She smelled of broken promises.

I turned my attention back to my magazine. Ah, Madonna has another ‘foreign investment’. This one is from Tanzania and its name has not yet been released to the media. Fascinating stuff.

Tuppety taleev.

It smells like oil.

The homeless guy stood up and moved slowly in front of the ‘broken blonde’ next to me. I was about to chase him off when he calmly poured the contents of his Styrofoam cup over her head and flicked a match.

It was oil.

The more she screamed and tried to slap out the flames, the more her flesh burned.

The homeless guy stood there calmly, flames dancing in his eyes and said...

Too pretty to live. . .