Foul brew

On a recent morning, I decided to grab a cup of dark roast coffee at a Starbucks I often stop at on my way to work.  A great group of young people work there and they nearly always serve up a fine brew with kindness and courtesy.  On this particular morning, however, things started going south shortly after I pulled up to the drive-through window.  I gave the young man $2.85 for my $2.84 order, and he handed me the cup of coffee.  Almost immediately, the 85 cents in coins seemed to confuse the young gentleman.  Granted, I had fished around in my change drawer to come up with a quarter, five dimes and two nickels, and the combination of coins seemed to present quite a challenge to his powers of arithmetic.  Eventually, he had to pull out a calculator to finish the job.  In the meantime, I’m sitting there feeling like the lord of all tightwads while waiting for my penny in change, but I didn’t want to just drive off because sometimes I screw up and hand over the wrong amount.  As I waited, however, a foul odor that can only be described as the smell of decomposition began to fill the inside of my car.  Penny in hand, I began to pull away as the odor of dead, decaying animal carcass grew in power and potency.  Thinking perhaps some varmint had crawled up under the hood and died, and the vent was blowing the smell into the cab, I quickly turned off the fan.  But this did nothing to stifle the inescapable smell of death that now surrounded me.  Then my attention turned to the cup of coffee.  I picked it up and took a sniff.  The horror!  From what ancient crypt did this foul brew flow?  Quickly, I weighed my options.  There was no way I was going to drink this roadkill roast that currently sat in my cup holder.  But I couldn’t survive a morning of work without a cup of joe.  Fortunately, another coffee shop lay up ahead and I swerved into their lot.  After pouring the java of death into a sewer grate, I went inside and explained my predicament to the young ladies behind the counter.  They set me up with a fresh cup of brew for which I tipped them generously.  I held the steaming cup to my nose and took a big whiff.  Ahh, it smelled like charred wood and fresh dirt, just the way I like it.