Mister Understood

Lately, there’s been much unrest in the sugar caddy communities at Cafe Verona, but a bittersweet ending has unfolded.

come over here and give your uncle suge knight some sugar

Once beacons of utopian acceptance, the populations of these caddies divided years ago into vicious factions along color lines and otherwise. After years of pleasant naiveté, restaurant business declined and left sweeteners in the caddies long enough to learn their gruesome fates. The societies devolved into cauldrens of hate and violence, rife with factions–the dead and dismembered sifting to the bottom of the cheap plastic containers.

The Spelendas controlled the government and dictated with a unflinching fist. And you never called ‘em yellow, ’cause they were quick to rebut you with lethal force. The Sugar in the Raws had gotten pushed to the outskirts of the caddy due to bigotry–de facto & jure–while the White Sugars had the most powerful gangs in the caddies. But even among the whites there was division, the oldest having been marked with ambient car-exhaust to an unrecognizable degree and thrust from grace. Finally, the Honeys and the Sweet ‘n Lows were in constant fear of the violent and reckless Equals whose shameless tactics and behavior are unmentionable.

Through all this, an unlikely love story survived. A hardened old honey and an exhausted white sugar had managed to nurture and blossom a secret love that’d lasted for longer than most lineages of table sweeteners. Despite their differences, the aging purity of this honey and sugar seemed to be an unlikely yet undeniable match. Their ratty state made it unlikely that anyone would choose either of them, so they dreamt that they might last forever. The two would steal away late in darkness and dangle their bottoms in the still fountain. The sugar would massage the honey to try and loosen the crystals that made it painful for her to move, then the honey would brush the exhaust off the sugar, though the hard crystals inside of her made the attempts more touching than productive.

But yesterday, God Celestino stamped the fate of these two old lovers. It was last night that I was to erase the lines that divided and dissolve the bonds that held like and like together when I dumped all of the sweeteners into one big mozzarella container and put the empty caddies through the dishwasher. Instructed to get rid of only the worst of the sweeteners I did, but there were only two that could jeopardize the sanitation grade of the cafe–one hardened old honey and one exhausted white sugar.

They are in the dumpster now, but the hope and love that these two mass-produced single-serving sweeteners managed will be a fleeting and forgotten testament to the sweetener spirit. In such trying turmoil, these two different souls managed to make something beautiful, but they would be the first to hope the fresh start makes for better caddies where conditions for a forbidden love like theirs could never be possible.