It's All Over Now, Baby Blue
First posted October 2023.
Author's Note
In case you missed it, Author Avengers is an initiative put together by the lovely Lou Yardley. We’re a group of authors on Ko-fi who promote, encourage, and share each other’s work.
Every month, we have a new writing prompt for which we all write a story. Here’s what we’re working with this month:
You run a café on the edge of life and death. Souls who have been departed from their bodies temporarily, such as in comas or near-death experiences, can relax in your quaint cafe for as long as they need before they can either return to their bodies or begin their journey to the afterlife.
As is my wont, I’ve taken a fairytale spin on this one. Hope you enjoy it, and stay tuned for the round-up at the end of the month with everyone’s prompt fills!
-
The booming echo of the tower bell faded into the tuneless chime of the tiny, clustered bells above the glass door through which she was surprised to find herself stepping. Behind the bar across the room, puffs of steam rose from the whirring machines, whose pipes and levers danced under the elegant hands of the purple-haired woman operating them. Golden sunlight gleamed on polished wood, and silent patrons sat at solitary tables, staring at the contents of their nondescript mugs.
Slowly, she walked up to the counter, the click of her heels forming a steady beat to the gentle acoustic guitar music. She breathed in the scents of coffee and freshly-baked scones, the air tinged with orange and vanilla. Something stale ran an undercurrent to the comforting, homely smells: something ancient, like mildew beneath a layer of dust.
The purple-haired woman turned her head over her shoulder, twisting the rest of her body to follow. A nametag pinned to the strap of her ruffled apron read ‘Lilac.’ Wiping her hands on a tea towel and setting it aside, she leaned on her forearms and asked in a voice warm and rumbling as a crackling fire, “What can I get you, honey?”
Unsure how to respond, she tucked a golden curl behind her ear and hesitantly glanced around the room. She didn’t think she’d ever been anywhere like this, but she couldn’t convince herself she hadn’t. Lilac looked familiar, but she couldn’t place where she’d seen her before.
Holding up a finger and bearing a self-satisfied smile, Lilac said, “No, don’t tell me.” Without another word, she turned and quickly tapped a few levers in quick succession. Steam swirled around her as she stepped one way, then the other, almost balletic in her swing and sway. Gentle hissing and the sound of bubbling liquids formed an inexplicably cheery rhythm. She took a gleaming white mug from the tower stacked to one side of the machines and whirled away behind the wall of steam.
A few moments later, she emerged, pushing the mug across the counter. “A lavender latte for Rose.”
Her breath stopped in her throat at the sound of her name. It sounded thin and sharp in her ear, like razor wire strung taut above her head. No words could be coaxed from her dry mouth. Flushing, she reached out and curled her hand around the mug.
The heat stung one of her fingers and she flinched. Gingerly pulling the finger off the mug, she looked at the wound in her fingertip: an oval, dark-red cut, so wide and deep she wasn’t sure how she’d forgot she had it. She wasn’t sure why she didn’t remember getting it, either.
Lilac’s gaze rested on the wound, and she pressed her lips together in a solemn grimace. “Go sit down, honey. I’ll be right there.”
She walked to an empty table by the window, pulled out a chair, and primly seated herself in it. Outside, she could see nothing but black, despite the golden light streaming through. It was a strange kind of eclipse, with light burning around the edges of the darkness blocking it.
Still patting her hands dry on her apron, Lilac walked around the corner of the bar and took a seat across from Rose. The expression on Lilac’s face was difficult to read: familiar, yet strange; mournful, yet joyous. Rose watched her over the rim of her mug as she took a sip of the lightly floral drink.
Lilac folded her hands on top of the table. “The first thing you have to understand,” she said, “is that this place is in-between. It isn’t one place or the other.”
Rose looked at her blankly. “What places?”
Lilac took a deep, but short breath. There was a mild annoyance in the familiarity of her tone, as if she were gently reprimanding a beloved child. “You’re asleep, Rosie, but you’re not dreaming.”
“I’m dead?”
“No,” Lilac shook her head with a weary sigh. “That would very firmly put you in one place. Being alive would put you in the other. This place is in-between. Understand?”
“Oh.” Rose paused. She didn’t really think she understood; she could feel thoughts swimming to and fro in her dizzy head, but not one of them a memory. Dreamlike inconsistency was somehow familiar: recollections not of words or thoughts, but merely of feelings, out of place and time. How had she got in-between? Part of her believed she’d been in-between all her life.
“You can stay as long as you want,” Lilac said.
Nodding, Rose folded her hands on the table. Her spine was perfectly straight, and her shoulders relaxed. Finally, she felt still. She closed her eyes, trying to place herself in the moment. Her first instinct was to run.
“What if I want to leave?” she asked, opening her eyes.
“You can do that, too.” Lilac nodded at the door. “But it doesn’t open as easily from this side as it did the other.”
Rose looked at the door. The opaque glass reflected the golden light shining through the windows, searing angled negative images into Rose’s vision. She wished so badly that it would remind her of something. Anything. She was already asleep, but she felt so tired. Wiping a tear off her cheek, she delicately picked up her mug, holding it with her fingertips, and took another long sip.
Lilac took her hand across the table as she put the mug down. “I’ll do what I can for you, dear,” she said.
Though she hadn’t continued, Rose heard the final words of the conversation in her head nonetheless: “But you have to open that door yourself.”
-
The angle of the light through the windows never changed; shadows never danced their slow, methodical foxtrot across the floor. Night never came, but Rose would not have called it day there either. Looking out on the gilded darkness through the window, she sipped her lavender latte and let the memories come back to her one by one.
There had been a blessing, and a curse. A prophecy had come to pass, as prophecies tend to do. She remembered fear, and little else: fear in the flames of burning spinning wheels, fear plain in the faces of her parents while they watched her as if she were a ticking time bomb, fear in the ignorance of what it was her parents feared.
She remembered want. She remembered feeling so fragile she would smash if she fell to the ground, and how desperately she wanted to try it. She remembered dreaming of running in the forest, of fencing with the guards, of swinging on the tree swing in the garden, of climbing mountains and hopping across river rocks. Dreams of these things were all she remembered; never once had she been allowed to do anything she wished. It was too dangerous, she was told.
Rose pressed her hands around the hot ceramic mug. They burned. She pressed harder.
-
Time passed; it might have been a hundred hours or a hundred years, but Rose could not tell the difference. Though the light in the café never changed, she had come to think of a certain period of time as the dawn.
It had always been her favourite time: not quite of day, though not quite of night either. She loved to lie awake in the hours when the sky began to lighten, even before the sun’s first rising glimpse could be seen. The consuming despair of night was over, and the day was becoming, not yet fixed. What she liked about it was the change, the way it fooled you into thinking it was static until you closed your eyes and saw a different world when you opened them. You could let yourself think the sky would remain in its wavering indigo forever and not realise until it had become a bright, sunless pink that you’d been wrong from the start. She liked to think she, too, could change before the eyes of people who refused to accept she was growing.
“The vagabond who’s rapping at your door,” a voice sang from the crackling music playing through the café, “is standing in the clothes that you once wore.”
Rose walked up to the counter to order another drink. She didn’t always have to; usually, Lilac brought over a refill every time Rose found herself thinking about getting another. This time, she wanted to place the order herself. Lilac must have known.
She smiled knowingly at Rose as she approached, and before Rose could speak, Lilac had already begun her dance with the machines. As she passed the drink over the counter, Lilac asked, “So, got an idea of where you’re headed yet?”
Rose idly tapped her fingers on the side of the mug. “I think it depends what I’d be going back to.”
Shaking her head, Lilac replied, “You can’t make this decision that way.”
“Why not?”
Lilac’s violet eyes fixed on Rose, the silver-grey flecks in them sparkling softly as they caught the light. “You can’t see clearly from here. All the good in the world never seems like enough. All the bad seems worse.”
A quiet whistle filled the air from the machines winding down. Wisps of steam lazily trailed out the exhaust vents. In the moments of silence between the end of one song and the beginning of the next, dishes clinked as people at other tables picked up and set down their drinks. Rose rubbed her forehead, disrupting the sheen of sweat forming there. “How do I decide, then?”
With a shrug, Lilac walked over to the pastry case and began rearranging muffins inside it. “That’s something you have to figure out yourself.”
“Didn’t you say you’d do what you can for me?” As soon as the question had been asked, Rose pressed her lips together in an anxious line. It sounded more petulant aloud than it had in her head.
Lilac raised an eyebrow, smirking not unkindly over the top of the case. “No one can save you but yourself, Rosie. That’s true in every world.” She passed a small plate with a blueberry muffin over the case.
Rose took the plate back to her table, set it down, and turned away from it, staring out the window with her arms crossed over her chest.
-
Dawn came and left a number of times. Rose wasn’t counting.
Some of the other patrons of the café had come and gone, too. She couldn’t tell which way they went; in fact, she hadn’t seen them leave. To be fair, she hadn’t been paying much attention to them. Their faces had become familiar over time, but she had never said a word to anyone there besides Lilac. One moment she was looking aimlessly around the room, and then suddenly she realised they were gone, with new arrivals sat at their tables.
She wondered about them: who they were, what their lives had been like, why they were here. Each person seemed a private universe, hidden in plain sight. Every thought kept locked away so that no one would know the full extent of their being. Something kept her from rising from her seat when she thought of going to talk to one of them, and the pang of denial pricked sharp as a spindle.
Lilac walked over to the table and set down a lavender latte in front of her. “You seem deep in thought today,” she said, cocking a hip and resting a hand on it.
Rose looked up at her and flashed a quick, sad smile. “Just remembering something.”
“Ah,” Lilac said. She turned and leaned backwards against Rose’s table, sticking her hands in her apron pockets. “Care to share?”
Rose pulled her mug closer to her, running her finger along the rim. “I...was remembering not talking to my parents. That sounds silly, doesn’t it?”
“No. Choosing not to do something is an action just like any other.”
Rose nodded. “I used to talk to them. They always told me no, though. They always looked so disappointed or frightened when I told them what I thought, what I wanted.” She rubbed her wounded finger on the side of the mug. “But everyone’s like that, I suppose. We have these big, wild thoughts that scare people when we share them, so we learn not to. And now we’re just a room full of quiet people lost in our own worlds.”
Lilac didn’t respond for a long moment, and Rose quietly sipped her latte.
“That’s no way to treat people you love,” Lilac said after a while, her voice low and solemn.
Rose flushed. “My parents were just worried—“
“No, I meant you.” Lilac faced her, arms crossed over her chest as she looked down at Rose. Her eyes flashed like blades in sunlight. Rose sank down in her chair. “Hiding yourself from them, making yourself smaller to fit the shape you think they want you to be. If they love you, don’t they want to see you? If you love someone, don’t you want them to be all of themself, not just the least objectionable fraction?”
When Rose didn’t respond, Lilac walked back to the counter without another word. In the distance, Rose heard a sound like branches cracking, and when she breathed in, she smelled not coffee and sugar in the café’s air, but wood rot and old blood.
-
Love, or at least the idea of it, had loomed over Rose’s waking life. Just as inescapable as the curse was that which would break it; if one was fated, so was the other. Despite the kingdom’s best efforts, nothing could prevent the curse from taking hold. Willed or resisted, it would come. Rose had assumed love would be the same; it would simply descend upon her like the night, whether she welcomed it or pushed it away.
But love is not like a curse. Love is not a supernatural power, a magic spell, a force of nature. Love is an action. Love is a choice. Love is not bestowed, but cultivated.
Time passed. Rose thought, and decided.
She approached the counter, and Lilac held her gaze neutrally. “What can I get for you, Rosie?”
“A lavender latte, please.”
“Coming right up.”
Rose watched the whirl of Lilac’s skirt as she twirled from one side of the bar to the other, flicking on and off machines as she made Rose’s drink. Something about the movement seemed more familiar today than it had before. She could almost hear the music of a waltz playing somewhere far away.
Lilac had been right; memory would never be enough. The world she had left behind was just that —left behind. What was wonderful about it could never be found again, but then, neither could what was terrible about it. It wasn’t enough to remember. She had to imagine. She had to dream.
As Lilac slid the drink across the counter, Rose thanked her, but didn’t walk away. She looked up at Lilac with a smile she was trying to hold firmly in place, though it wavered. “I think I’m going to leave today.”
Lilac nodded, her expression still carefully blank. “Which way are you headed?”
Rose bit her lip, breathing deeply through her nose before responding. “I was thinking about what you said before. How if you love people, you let them see all of you: the beautiful and the ugly, the good and the bad.”
“You want to let your parents see you?” asked Lilac, with a cautious tone in her voice.
Rose tilted her chin up. Her smile stayed in place, unwavering. “I want to let myself see me. I want to be the person I pretended I didn’t want to be. I want to see what I can do, if I let myself—if I let myself try.”
A golden glow crept into the corners of Rose’s vision, and it took her a moment to realise the light was coming not from Lilac, but herself. Lilac smiled, warm and open. The silver flecks in her eyes sparkled as she clasped her hands over her heart.
Sharp and cold, a breeze sliced through her, pulling her backwards. Light burned from gold to white, searing the café from Rose’s vision. The sounds of cracking branches and singing birds grew louder. Pain shot through her finger and she felt the sluggish pulse of blood slowly start to quicken. She gasped down dry air that tasted of rust and roses.
The wall of light began to fade, and in the encompassing darkness, Rose heard Lilac’s voice whisper in her ear.
“Time to wake up.”