Miguel monitored Jeanine’s coffee.  If he thought she had more than two cups at home, he’d nag her.
        “This isn’t coffee,” she’d say, gulping the last bit down before he could peer into her pink mug.  They had a nice cream-colored set of cups and saucers, but the mug was hers, large, and her favorite color.
        “Didn’t you just have a cup?  And what about work?  You drink it all day long there.  No wonder you get no sleep.  I don’t understand.  It’s so counterproductive, chica.”
        It was just like him to use the word ‘counter-productive’.  It didn’t happen every time she drank coffee, but she recalled sometimes, unable to sleep, how she watched him in the wee hours sleeping stiff as a corpse. 
        “My lack of sleep has more to do with the things on my mind,” she told him, in that tone that usually stopped him from continuing the subject.
    
One night, after a fitful fall into sleep, she woke up screaming, and hit him between the legs.  She hadn’t hurt him.  Miguel was more concerned with what was wrong.  He turned in the bed to face her, then grabbed her shoulders.  She tried running out of bed, finally stopping under his grip. 
        “Jeanine!” he yelled.
        She tried to focus, taking in his murky consoling figure, feeling the vice grip of his hands on her upper arms.  She was slightly comforted, though still trying to push against his forearms to break free.  She calmed down.  When her breathing became normal and her eyes focused, she spoke through the pastiness that had formed in her mouth after three mere hours of sleep.  
        “I’m so sorry,” she said, embarrassed.
        “Was it that dream?  The one where the mutant with the huge red penis chases you into that crooked tiled house?  The psychedelia?”
        “Psychedelia?  No.  Don’t call it that.  Makes it sound like a psychedelic trip, like fun or something.” She marveled at Miguel’s colorful way with descriptions.  “They’re night terrors, some kind—form—of nightmare.  Comes on when I’m stressed out,” she mumbled, attempting to skim unintelligibly over the subject.  She was preoccupied with avoiding giving him more of an explanation.  Admitting that the attacks were more likely to happen after a build-up of caffeine in her system would cause him to nag her even more about drinking coffee, and she couldn’t deal with that.
    
Her routine was to set the automatic coffee-maker in the evening so it trickled down by 6:30 a.m., waiting for her.  This was the way she woke up.  She could smell it in her dreams.  This morning cup was the only one that Miguel shared with her.  She put a spoon or two of sugar into the first few cups of the day, and none in the rest.  Each cup had enough milk to make it verge on light.
        The doctor warned that her hiatal hernia would cause her to aspirate fluids into her lungs if she drank too much.  Her stomach, she imagined, would press into the membrane dividing her lungs from her digestive system, causing liquid to leak into her lungs through microscopic holes.  It was as if she was some kind of a freak.
        And lately, drinking more than two cups a day made digesting food complicated.  The food just sat there, in the middle of her esophagus.  She mentioned nothing of her health issue to Miguel.
    
A few nights later, they had flipped too many pages over in the Mayo Clinic Family Health Book, past the colored glossy illustrations of people with diseases of the skin and mouth.  Jeanine wanted to show him that close-up of the tongue with black hair parted at the center, fading out toward the epiglottis.  ‘Hairy Black Tongue,’ the caption read.  But a clump of gruesome, glossy pages stuck together when she turned, coincidentally landing them on the page with the definition of Jeanine’s malediction.  Night Terrors:  a feeling of impending death, palpitations, and screaming, triggered by unknown fear.
        “Look,” said Miguel squinting, concentrating on the page.  He scanned the definition with his finger, reading to himself.  Jeanine leaned back into the pillow on the sofa, arms folded tightly across her stomach.  Their gruesome glee was surely destroyed by his discovery.
        “Worsened by the consumption of caffeine.  See.”  He had uncovered helpful information, he thought.
        “Oh please,” she said weakly.  “So, I suppose I should stop drinking it now, according to this book?”
        Miguel looked up from the book, stupefied.  “Yes, you should stop drinking that coffee, chica.  It’s triggering an anxiety disorder.  Why would you purposely drink something that makes you sick?  What am I supposed to do if you should have another one of those screaming attacks?”  He shook his head.
        She was exposed.  Her urbane and mildly decadent habit was triggering an illness.  “I just let myself get a little too wound up that day, which had more to do with why that happened,” she said bounding up to do the dishes.  With the water on high, she made more noise than usual while washing them.
    
Torpor pervaded the apartment the next evening.  Jeanine and Miguel came home from work with no energy, although Jeanine had just the cure for that.  To the right of the refrigerator, a brown bag filled with French roast beans lay waiting.  Miguel had arrived home first and pulled out the sofa bed, covering himself with the blue comforter, in front of the TV.  Jeanine saw the extended bed from the small foyer when she walked in.
        “Hey honey, you sick?”
        “I just need to rest,” he said lazily. 
        He deserved his rest.  He usually got home late, as he took graduate courses and karate
    
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 classes, and there was that curious ballroom dancing.  He belonged to community groups, including the Neighborhood Watch, and the Uptown Preservation Society; but he wasn’t committed to any of them.  He liked the community groups because they included outings to historical sites, and pubs in the area that featured local talent.  Miguel was also a magician with appliances.  In the five months they had lived together, he fixed a lamp, the radiator, the television, an iron, the refrigerator, and the bathroom pipe twice.  It was disorienting for Jeanine to see him so limp.
        “Aren’t you supposed to be studying
tonight?”  She walked past the bed to the dressing area to take off her clothes.  With effort, she bent over and strained to pull off one black boot.
        “I have a question.”  Miguel followed her with his eyes between the dressing area and bathroom, ignoring her question about studying.  Intrigued by the mystery of his voice, she peered at him from the doorframe of the dressing area, holding a bar of cream-colored soap.  Alas, that unfamiliar mass of flesh on the bed had been resurrected.
        “What is your, question?” Jeanine asked, as if pondering the meaning of the word ‘question.’
        “You drinking coffee tonight, chica?”  A sucker punch.  He lay there impotent, yet still able to cause ripples in the night.
        “Probably—I don’t know.  Why should you give a shit?”  She walked stiffly to the bathroom, not bothering to take off the other boot, and ran the water, lathering her hands with great force.  Slathering her face, she stared into the mirror through thick, creamy foam around her eyes and mouth, practicing relaxing her features, though she could barely see them.  She focused closely on her skin after rinsing.  It wasn’t clear.  Nothing anyone would notice, really, but it was blotchy and mildly discolored in spots.
        Did it look unhealthy?  That women’s health magazine said that constipation made your skin break out.  And that’s what the coffee had done to her lately.  Should she cut down?
        Moving on, as if Miguel hadn’t bothered her, would lead them smoothly into other subjects, she thought hopefully.  But she couldn’t help thinking of the surge of caffeine in her stomach, branching out to her fingers and toes—of course, she was going to drink coffee.  The blotches on her skin—infinitesimal.
        “Come out of there.  Let’s have a talk.”
        “In a minute,” she said.  She looked at her face from different angles, until convincing herself that no one would notice the blotches.
    
Eight cups of coffee everyday used to be the norm, but now the hernia made it harder.  Today she had one morning cup with Miguel as usual, and four cups and an espresso at work.  She had to have just one more.  Miguel had to know this, especially because their apartment was too small to conceal the sound and smell of coffee brewing.  If he was going to live in her apartment, he would have to back off.  She could do what she wanted as an adult.  The night terrors, she supposed, were a legitimate concern for him.  But what could she possibly say to legitimize her need?  Not a thing.  She came out the bathroom and stood in front of the television, blocking his view, still wearing the one black boot. 
        “I fucking love coffee!  Coffee is my savior.  Coffee aids me, helps me get things accomplished.  It flourishes in me, gently pushing me ahead.  It sparks, it tingles, energizes.  I’m going to drink coffee until I rot from my esophagus all the way down to my anus.” 
       
Miguel stared at her with his mouth slightly open.  He breathed in then huffed out.  He pulled his orange tee-shirt off, lifting his body slightly to get it from the underside.  He threw the shirt on the shaker chair to the right of the bed.  His red-brown shoulders heaved up and down as he laughed before letting out an exaggerated sigh.  He reached under the blanket and pulled off his boxer shorts, tossing those too on the shaker chair.
        “Explain the, esophagus-anus, destructive thing,” he said, twirling his left hand around, as his eyes burned into Jeanine’s, belying the feature of a prostrate body. “This is some kind of thing to look forward to?” he said.  He was a willing listener as usual, an explorer.
        “Well, we’re going to deteriorate one way or another.  Feels good to have some control over that, as well as getting so much out of my chosen vice.  And, if it weren’t coffee for me, it’d be something else, maybe something a lot worse…
        “So Miguel, in the larger scheme, what’s wrong with a few thousand cups of coffee?” she said finally, vibing with his penchant for colorful language.
        “Oh, I don’t like you rotting from the inside out.  But you say you get a tingly feeling and then a kind of a rush?”
        “An enlivening propulsion,” she said, standing over the bed rubbing his feet.
        “A magical elixir,” Miguel said.  His eyes flashed at her.
        Before getting into the bed with him, she would grind the coffee beans to make enough for   them both.
    
  
                       About the Author
     
        Sandee V. Harris writes from Manhattan.  She works at Wave Hill, a public garden and cultural center in the Bronx. She was born in Harlem Hospital, wrote her first story when she was seven, and studied writing at Columbia University.
        Her collection of work includes a novel, and several short stories that she plans to market more actively in the future.  Recently she completed a screenplay about a gremlin that she hopes her brother, a filmmaker, might take on as a project.     “Night Terrors” is her first published piece of fiction.