A Dead Man's Coffee Cup

very short fiction

A month ago, I inherited a dead man's coffee cup—an antique tin one with scars caused by decades of constant use. It had belonged to my uncle, Mick Jagger. No, not that Mick Jagger. My uncle was nicknamed Mick Jagger when he was a kid because he liked to shoplift candy bars from the tribal trading post. You probably know that kleptomaniacs are often accused of having "sticky fingers" and the Rolling Stones best album is called Sticky Fingers, so those two facts blended in the reservation consciousness and turned my uncle into Mick Jagger. He stopped shoplifting when he was twelve but his nickname never changed. Once you're Mick Jagger, you're always Mick Jagger. That nickname was even carved on his tombstone, in parentheses, beneath his birth name.

He was my favorite uncle. I cried at his funeral. My uncle's brother, who was also my father, inherited Mick Jagger's motorcycle while I got the coffee cup. But it wasn't my uncle who decided who received what after he died. That was all decided by our family and you know how ugly families can get. Our tribe were never dog-eaters but you can absolutely imagine my skinny cousins microwaving Cocker Spaniels and my fat cousins spit-roasting a St. Bernard. I love my people but they all got trickster blood giggling and cussing through their veins.

I didn't care about that motorcycle. We always thought that Mick Jagger was gonna crash and die on it. He never did. He died of bone cancer. But now we’re just as sure that my father will eventually crash and die.

That red coffee cup was a quiet thing. That's why I loved it. My uncle always woke at dawn and would sit on his front porch sipping his too-sugary Folger's Instant from that cup. Anybody could join him but nobody was supposed to talk. That was a difficult task for reservation residents. Indians love to talk—every tribal member's Indian name could be Dances with Monologue—so it was usually just Mick Jagger and me silently sharing the dawn.

Our tribe's name, Spokane, means "Children of the Sun," so it was like my uncle and I, in greeting the sun, were praising the first mother and the first father—the Eve and Adam of us but not the Adam and Eve of you.

I didn't drink coffee. I drank water and sometimes juice if my uncle had enough money to buy it.

I'm never gonna drink from Mick Jagger's coffee cup, though. A week after they gave it to me, I walked deep into the forest behind the house. I found the tallest old-growth pine, one of those trees too respected by Indians to ever be cut down. Carrying Mick Jagger's cup, I climbed to the top of that tree, up where the thinnest branches grow. They barely supported my weight. I was scared. My heart and my scrotum switched places but I reached up to the very tip of the tree, to that last vertical branch—that finger—then threaded the cup handle over it and let it drop. It worked. Mick Jagger's cup was stuck like a ring on that tree's crown.

I climbed down and stared up. I couldn't see that cup but I knew it was there. Maybe someday the branch will break and the cup will fall. Or maybe it won’t. But I know for sure that tree will keep growing. It will keep getting taller and taller. And it will carry my uncle's coffee cup closer and closer to the sun.