Trey was laughing to himself. A gleeful laugh that verged on manic. It was shrill like that of a child squealing as its fleshy thighs are pinched hard by an unremitting elderly relative with their saccharine smiles and even sicklier sweetened breath, but at the same time it was dry like the wind scouring over old, dead trees that had fallen at the edge of a dessert as the forests slowly retreated and gave way to the scouring sands and blazing heat.

It was a self satisfied laugh.

Trey was reading the news online.

A casual observer would have noted that the story being read was not a human interest story about some delightfully large and retarded cross eyed kitten competition, nor indeed anything to do with cats and their woefully abhorrent grasp of things such as grammar or correct spelling and punctuation.

If you want to sponsor my writing of Penitence & Therapy, please click here.

Trey was reading the regular crime beat, specifically comments from fellow officers.
“Did you read what Sanduval said about that Chinese beating? Seriously, what a cuntsnap!”

Trey slapped his thighs with both hands, repeatedly, like some kind of deranged, leering penguin with a fashionable hair cut.

Now.
Any moment now.
Just… about now.

Trey’s face fell like a child denied its parents gratifying praise on a particular subject that they often repeat, knowing it will lead precisely to this kind of praise. His brow furrowed, inching its way up his normally smooth forehead. Corners of a mouth normally smirking twisted upside down to become a frown. Eyes that were taking a thrill in reading idiotic comments from coworkers swiveled to the, with a slight craning of the neck to complete the change of point of view so that Trey could see behind him.

There was no feeling of someone behind him, frowning in a disapproving manner of the sheer joy he was taking in other people’s mistakes and misery. There was a lack Harvey’s smell. His cloying scent somewhere between sweetened cinnamon and a highschool’s gym locker room, simultaneously heady and foul in a way that can only be when you spend far too much time in another person’s presence and have come to expect it almost as often as not.

Harvey was not there and this worried Trey to a small extent.

He had an annoying insistence on extreme punctuality. On there on time, or five minutes before. Harvey’s timing was about as unfashionable as his Target derived wardrobe, and said a nearly identical thing about his personality: His pragmatism and cynicism had killed his imagination.

It was a mental image that brought a fresh grin to Trey’s face, but it was fleeting.
There was the sound of crash down the hallway.

“FUCK!”

Drama. Trey popped his head out the door of their cubicle and looked down the corridor to see Harvey limping, while Morris and Chandrasshar giggled like schoolgirls, caught out with some illicit note that they were desperately trying to hide from a teacher, at their own desk.

“IT’S NOT FUCKING FUNNY!” Harvey roared at them, and continued to hobble towards his own cubicle.

He looked shit.

Worse than shit. Like death slightly warmed up, allowed to go tepid on the kitchen bench, refrozen for a few weeks, and then warmed up again before finally being discarded as simply not worth it while the original intendee simply ordered for some delivered san choy bow.

His clothing was in a shambles. Not even remotely fashionable at the best of times, Harvey at least had a sort of anti-fashion going for him in his grim refusal to wear anything that might look good on him. Everything was plain blacks, with the occasional pin stripe, and loosely fitting to hide his true size or shape. His jacket was the perfect example of his obstinate refusal to let form get in the way of function. A jacket that’s cut had not been fashionable since Marlon Brando was attractive, it’s midnight black leather creased and pitted in thousands of places like the skin of some hideously old walrus, whilst at the same time being made supple by age, years of use, sweat and being lived in. Soft to the touch, but firm and unyielding layers of armouring mylar underneath to protect from cold winds, driving rains and weak attempts at stabbings. The eleven pockets throughout housing a seemingly endless array of small knick knacks and objects that perfectly suited the situation like a superhero’s utility belt. But today, it looked off kilter. The sleeves weren’t zipped, and the buckles had been done up incorrectly.

Even underneath the sunglasses, an item he rarely took outside of the car as they were prescription and almost solely intended for driving and good-cop-bad-cop routines, Trey could see the edges of deep, rich purple flesh pulling down at the middle of Harvey’s cheeks. It was almost like some sort of twisted cosmetics counter girl had simply given up believing in PETA and gone to town with her sample case on her pet bulldog, and then cleaned up the drool from around its lips where it had eaten two lipsticks and a foundation pad.

His hair was equally as bad. Usually kept in a ponytail that was tight, and slicked back, like a stage show magician hosting a late night TV show about debunking societal mores, it was starting to show signs of reverting to its all too natural and tragic afro.

Days like this really reminded Trey that it was a massive pity he and Harvey had missed the 70s where they most likely would have had their own award winning show by now, he wouldn’t have strangers attempting to assault him for their own confusion after attempting to pick him up, and Harvey could wear an open necked, popped collar shirt without automatically being a douche bag. Then again, they wouldn’t have had internet pornography either, so the trade offs were almost a perfect zero sum.

Harvey got to the door of their cubicle.

“Wow,” Trey said non-plussed “you’re late.”

Harvey locked eyes on Trey “I like to think of it as fashionably on time.”

“Yeah, you’d get away with that if you were fashionable.”

There was a pause.

“Touche.”

Harvey sat down with a groan, his head hitting the desk with a thud. “Coffee!” came from underneath his smooshed features. “Real coffee! From the hills of Columbia.”
Trey went out and put a table spoon of grinds into the office percolator. He sat and waited for it, knowing that contrary to a popular axiomatic saying, watched pots do indeed boil.

Slowly, with a hissing that he found oddly calming, like the background sounds of a familiar home, a thick black liquid started to drip out of the bottom of the filter and into one of the many office mugs. The flow increased, and the liquid sparkled in the harsh neon glow of the office lighting, a brown so deep and rich and heady it could almost be thought of as a concentration of the sweat and blood of all the third world labourers that were consistently abused and beaten, forced to live in near slave like conditions, to produce this particular luxury for the Western world. The acrid aroma of strong coffee filled Trey’s nostrils, sending him on a memory of one too many early mornings spent in the front seat of an unmarked car and trying not to fall asleep because they were watching yet another lead, some of which panned out and others that didn’t, but always, always on underneath that smell of far too much black coffee was the stench of stale cigarettes and the reek of Harvey slowly becoming more locker room than cinnamon.

The flow of coffee stopped and Trey came out of his reverie. He scooped up the mug in a deft hand, along with a small carton of long life milk from the shelf and took them both back to their cubicle.

“You had a night out and didn’t invite me… bitch!”

The accusation struck Harvey, and would have made him uncomfortable if it had been true. But it was not, and so he felt that the best explanation was simply to groan some more in a way that vaguely sounded negative.

His eyes hurt just to open them. The world was awash in a bright glare of uncomfortably bright whites like staring at sand in the afternoon on a hot Summer’s day.

You might also like to read:

1. Penitence & Therapy pt9
2. Penitence & Therapy pt5
3. Penitence & Therapy pt6
4. Penitence & Therapy pt3
5. Penitence & Therapy pt7

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