Polish, half-concealed, foliage

Polish, half-concealed, foliage, short story, 15 minutes, a prosecco writing session

A woman walked inside her Kiezcafe in a sunny, yet chilly afternoon. It was an autumn day. Summer, albeit so grand, was already gone. The trees turned from amber to brown. The hue of autumn had usurped the city, soon to be followed by the foliage.

“What can I get for you, madam?” asked the waiter in front of the bar. It was one of those cafes where one had to come to the bar to order. With minimum wages came the minimum service.

“Do you have bigos?” The woman looked a bit insecure. Bigos was not what you always get in a Berliner Café after all.

“Do I have what?” The waiter looked puzzled.

“Bigos, like the Polish Sauerkraut.” As if to justify herself, the woman added frantically, “’cause it says Polishe Spezialitäten on your window, you know.”

“We don’t have what you’re asking for. But we do have pierogi. It’s homemade.” “And you don’t even look remotely Polish,” added the waiter in his interior monologue. Indeed, this woman, though hard to tell her nationality, was ethnically Asian.

“Never mind. I’ll have a chicken pasta then.” The woman quickly altered her mind. Her first experience with pierogi was in a small town on the border of Germany and Poland. The fattiness was not meant for the drinking carousel of a certain heavy metal music festival she was taking part in. Pierogi itself brought back not necessarily bad, yet a bit awkward memory. “Pierogi,” she laughed at herself. This showed how mundane and puny she was compared with other writers. “Not madeleine or macarons, but pierogi, my trigger to involuntary memory.”

“Chicken pasta it is, then.” Shrugged the waiter, nonchalant to the woman’s tiny theater in her brain. When one works in Berlin, one has the privilege of encountering people bizarre in their own ways. It could be a metropolitan problem, or simply a Berlin problem.

The woman picked a table next to the giant glass window. She was sitting deep in the sofa, half-concealed, which granted her the position to observe the passersby outside without exposing herself to the risk of being observed.

The summer was already gone. A hot plate of creamy chicken pasta was fitting for such weather after all. It might be mundane, but would be enough to warm up a commonplace mind.