Coffee Time

When she sat down at the table she was carrying what looked like her regular coffee order. She liked iced lattes and this was definitely a latte…brimming with ice cubes and with delicate condensation dripping down the glass. In fact, it was a conversation about lattes which brought us together. I accidentally bumped into her a month ago with my order of a double espresso and this led to plenty of flirtatious talk and eventually to a series of dates, the latest of which I was on with her right now.

She always drank her latte with plenty of ice cubes, and I found it endearing. I teased her about being my Ice Queen. She smiled with the corner of her mouth and winked at me. Today, however, was fated to be the moment when our relationship changed. Those, it turned out, were not ice cubes. 

“What are they?” I asked. I probably shouldn’t have. Because she promptly invited me to follow her. We went behind the coffee bar to the supplies room in the back. There she lit a torch and led me down a series of steep stairwells to the dungeon below. I didn’t know about the dungeon when we started dating. 

As we neared the bottom of the last stairwell the light ahead of us glowed red. She turned back and winked at me again. It was then that I heard the tiny hammers. I stepped off the last step and into a massive underground cavern. Torches were hung here and there, illuminating the darkness, hence the red. And there were also children, thousands of children.

The children were employed, all bent in their ungodly task, on extracting something from the earth’s crust. “What are they doing?” I asked my girlfriend. 

“Step closer,” she said. “Good things come to those who wait.”

I wandered up and down the rows of diligent small heads. They all had hammers and they were all chipping away, chiseling, mining, carefully extracting…diamonds. That’s when it dawned on me. Those many iced lattes… In those multiple glistening glasses… On those countless delightful dates… Her coffee contained diamonds. 

She continued to lead me up and down the rows of small bodies. As she passed they looked up at her with whispered words of “Good day, mistress” and “At your service, milady.” It was also at that moment I saw the coiled whip tucked in her belt. Odd that I hadn’t noticed the whip before. But, you know, love and all that.

We returned to the surface but I couldn’t stop thinking about the children. Those children were  down there, toiling away in obscurity, never having been told that the world had moved on and that child labor was no longer an acceptable form of work.

Those children, these tiny children, were down there…and my date was their firm task master who occasionally went back there…down there, I should say, to enforce her cruel rule. Pelting them with shards of sharp coal (yes, I forgot to mention that she threw coal at them…and stones…really, whatever she had on hand) and administering thrashings with the whip. And the diamonds? Those were the offerings of the precious children. Offerings which they hoped would lead to freedom. 

But, freedom was not to be had. Instead the diamonds ended up in her drink. And now that I knew, what would I do? Would I do the sensible thing and cut off this relationship? I undoubtedly should. But…she’s so pretty. And children can learn valuable lessons from hardships.