“A hand taken needs a hand offered”. A Café Six.

Sources of inspiration surround us. In the people we meet, in the observations of daily life, in the words of fellow writers. This last, applies to me for this Six Sentence Café & Bistro Six, quasi-follow up to my Quicksand and Candy Canes Trilogy. Thank you, Clark for your Six Sentence Story and characters. I hope I have been forgiven for hijacking them! And mea culpa for giving speaking roles to some of the other SSC&B characters, in particular, certain of the other Proprietors. Got carried away, you guys 😁

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PART UN

An impromptu party orchestrated and implemented by the tall thin man, it was complete with special gifts prompting unexpected emotions from his 6 fellow Proprietors of the Six Sentence Café and Bistro; amidst the silence of gratitude, good natured ribbing and hearty laughter, not a one of them asked the reason for this surprise – it was sufficient they were together, this somewhat motley band of Proprietors, enjoying the magic of the moment.

Denise wasn’t as vain to believe the party was specifically for her, yet she suspected the timing of it, impromptu or not, was intended to coincide with her release from the hospital and return to the Café, as Bartender and sometime house band member. Adept at slipping away from social gatherings unnoticed, the celebration in the main room of the Six Sentence Café and Bistro no exception, she feigned a trip to the ladies room and retreated towards the narrow, dimly lit hallway at the far end of the bar.

As if photoluminescent, the flaking gold fleck letters spelling “Manager’s Office” affixed to the heavy wooden door gradually lost their “glow in the dark” effect the closer she got to it though she’d swear if you looked away and back real quick, you could see them shimmer; opening the door and crossing the threshold, she felt a weight she hadn’t realized was so heavy disappear like butter over an open flame.

Her eyes wandering the room, bypassed the desk where she balanced the Café books, the fireside chairs where she’d read or engage in one sided conversations with long dead music and film idols whose paper images looked down from the walls; like a woman lost in the desert suddenly come upon an oasis paused and, flipping off her shoes, went straight for the couch in the corner of the room and sunk into its soft burgundy leather.

Here she’d have uninterrupted time to think more about her, about the woman, Angelique Déchue, the woman from her dream except it hadn’t been a dream; still reeling from the experience, careful not to let on, she relived it to the extent her mind and body allowed; still, she wasn’t ready to talk about it out loud even to the 3 people she trusted would listen and not dismiss her story as after effects from what her medical team identified as “self induced coma”.