Blueberry Jam Kisses

I submitted this piece to the last Literary Taxidermy competition. The opening and closing lines were given by the competition hosts, originally taken from "Je Ne Parle Pas Français" by Katherine Mansfield.

Blueberry Jam Kisses

I do not know why I have such a fancy for this little café. The coffee is swill, and the décor blinds you with its blandness: bright lights, blank walls, bleached floors, and a blundering, loopy pattern on the tablecloths that demands your eyes doodle along the scoops and swirls until it hurts. But the muffins are crispy on top and popping with fresh blueberries, just like the ones Mama used to make after we went picking in the back woods in those carefree childhood summers that had no foreknowledge of aching backs bent over shuffling feet, or cold crooked fingers wrapped around coffee mugs. The mugs too are as grey as the walls – the coffee itself seems to have greyed. But the muffins taste like home.

Behind the counter smiles a girl with a midnight-blue dress beneath her apron, revealing the sunshine peeking out from behind her grey-sky eyes. I turn the other way at the corner every morning before heading to the office for those muffins and those bright smiling eyes. 

Perhaps it's not the café at all I have the fancy for.

This morning, as I step in, it feels unusually stale. No familiar smell of a well-roasted coffee bean and freshly baked goods greets me at the door. And the ambience feels changed: too bright, too white.

“Mornin',” I croak. “I’ll take a medium cream-no-sugar and a blueberry muffin, please. Be sure to find me one with an extra crispy top!” I tack on a wink.

Someone snorts from behind as she pulls up alongside me: an old woman leaning heavily over her walker, a shower of white fuzz splayed over a sour, closed-for-business face accentuated by wrinkles. She must be at least a hundred years old.

“Roger," sighs a strange voice at the counter, "we will let you know if we ever have blueb'y muffins or blue'by jam, as always.”

The barista's brisk tone grates me. I look up in surprise to see unsmiling brown eyes above a stiff mask.

“What'll it be, Roger? Carrot or bran?”

I shake my head. I must have mistaken her for someone else.

I totter over to my usual seat. The chair feels hard, not at all the plush coffeeshop chairs I expect, and there's nothing to look at on the wall. Odd, I could have sworn they had displayed artwork on these walls. Someone's artwork… Kateryna's artwork! Perhaps they've taken it down. But here still is that damned tablecloth. 

A plate appears before me. A messy omelet slumps upon it, lonely without any bacon or sausage for company. I puzzle at it. I didn’t order this, did I? And there isn't any ketchup either! I’d rather have a stack of sourdough toast with a thick layer of blueberry jam. And a muffin too, of course. 

But I must kiss these breakfast dreams goodbye, for no waiter bends down to consider my wishes anymore.

I take a sip of my coffee and glance at my watch. Forty minutes until my shift starts. I look back at the counter, but no one there wears midnight-blue dresses. Their plain, matching shirts and pants are pale blue, aqua green and pastel, and a cloud of netting holds their hair. The cheerless faces, half masked, are plain and indistinguishable. 

I guess this is Kateryna's day off. I shrug. I must have gotten her schedule mixed up.

“Hi Roger,” a voice by my ear rasps. I look up to see a tremulous old man towering over me. “What’s that you got there? Carrot, or bran? There was one berry burst left and I grabbed it before you got in. It's not blueberry, but you kin have it.”

I blink. I don’t recall this old geezer among my acquaintances at the Uptown Café. But carrot doesn’t suit me, so I accept the dilapidated whole-grain berry-burst excuse for a muffin off his plate and nod a gruff thanks. I take a dubious nibble, but raspberries and strawberries ain't no fresh blueberries. And the top isn’t even crispy.

My eyes stray to study the dizzying pattern of the tablecloth. It wobbles in strange curves that remind me a bit of the shape of muffins – but more like a clammy lump of some kind of whiteish muffin that tastes like slippery dirt. But real dirt is preferable! I’ve tasted dirt before, many times; when a berry falls to the ground, you still eat it, dirt and all.

I glance at my watch again to make sure I’m not late for work. I could come back after work, headache or no, to see if Kateryna is working the afternoon.

I have a secret. I'm going to marry that girl.

An absent-minded experimental taste of the omelet finds a rubbery, slug-like bit of something grey slipping around in my mouth. I gag and spit it out. Ugh.

That’s what those shapes on the tablecloth remind me of. Mushrooms! Good God, I despise mushrooms. Kateryna used to put them in omelets too. I love that woman, but never loved her omelets. Our children particularly like mushrooms fried in butter with onions, and they used to tease me with the ones they picked in the back woods. Further back than the blueberries, nails full of dirt; and they knew the edibles from the poisonous, those smart little 'uns. Their mother's children.

I look at my watch. Wait… what am I doing? I don’t work at the office anymore, not since we moved back to Mama and Dad's farm to raise a family. 

“Roger,” cuts in the fake-pleasant voice of one of those stiff, plain shirts-and-pants, “you have a visitor for breakfast today.”

“You call this breakfast?” I scoff. 

A pretty woman dips into the chair across from me and looks at me. I look back. She has sky-grey eyes, but no sunshine peeking out from behind them. 

How am I supposed to recognize my visitors when they come in with half their face covered in these obscene scraps of the same hospital-blue that pervades this once cozy café?

“Hi, Dad,” she says. “I brought you something for your omelet!”

The blonde hair framing her seaside eyes isn't familiar. Kateryna's hair is ebony brown, and mine... well, mine has turned to ashes now, I suppose.

She retrieves a little packet of something from her purse, slitting it open and squirting it onto my plate. Ketchup! The woman read my mind. I beam at her. I think she's smiling back behind her mask, but the clouds gathering in her eyes are heavy. It is a misty day in those skies.

“Take a bite, Dad,” she prompts. I slide a lump of eggy mush onto my spoon and mull it over on my tongue. The nice set of teeth that used to flash flirtatious smiles Kateryna's way are no longer there. 

My eyes drift over to the pattern on the tablecloth. It has little half-circles, like seashells on stumps. Siobhan sliced her finger open along the edge of a broken seashell once when we took the kids to the seashore for the day. Her little fingers had dripped with blood, just like they are now – oh no, it's just ketchup.

The kids used to fill their sand buckets and pockets with all manner of seashells, not caring how wet they got if they ventured further into the waves, no matter how cool a day it was. When they got home, their brimming buckets would be handed over to the kitchen for pie-making and jams and muffins, their purple-stained pockets turned out and thrown in the wash, and purple lips washed with the gentlest touch of a warm cloth. The next morning there would be jam slathered thick on toast, and more gooey purple lips to kiss and to wipe clean after.

“We got more blueberries, Daddy!” echo the memories excitedly. “There were so many more than yesterday!”

Ah, childhood! Innocent days of adventure, before age stoops you down and rolls fog across your fading mind.

“How are you doing today?” the pretty woman asks.

“My head hurts,” I reply. My head perpetually aches from staring at that obnoxious winding pattern on the tablecloth every morning, noon, and night. It drums on my skull – knocking to see if anyone is still home, I suppose. “Kitty. My head hurts.”

“It's me, Daddy,” the woman says, leaning closer. “It's Siobhan.”

I avoid the worry swirling in her eyes. I look instead at the swirling of the tablecloth, from which offending little grey splotches mock me, reaching out to further imprison my mind within their chaos. I know these lines. They are familiar.

They look a bit like muffins. I remember how Mama used to make muffins, and Kateryna after her: round, plump, crispy on top, and popping with blueberries. There’s nothing crisp left in my mind, but there are still juicy bits of memories popping here and there. Little pattering feet; dancing in the kitchen; grass beneath our toes, young voices chattering and laughing among the trees; clothes pinned on a wire; twinkling grey-sky eyes; blueberry jam kisses.

“Siobhan,” I rasp to my grown-up little girl, “I want to go home.”

A single raindrop slinks down into her mask.

“This is your home now, Daddy,” she whispers.

Age is a thief in the night. Dissatisfied with its first taste of spoils, it returns to snatch another piece of you away. Your strength, your home… then your mind… your beloved Kitty…

“I was thinking about muffins,” I say softly after a moment, returning from the brink of lost thought. “Will you bake me some? Just like the ones your mother used to make?”

“Of course,” she smiles, a hint of sunshine at last perceptible not far behind the clouds. I can't see if the smile goes to her lips, though, underneath the mask. I remember those lips, twenty, thirty, – forty? years younger, smacking kisses on my cheek and leaving sticky traces of blueberry jam behind. 

“But what I wouldn't give," I add mournfully, "for a mouthful of blueberries plucked right fresh off the bush!”

I sigh, savouring the shadow of bursting blueberry on my tongue. A gentle voice tugs at the edge of my memory, singing to her children:

Sweet summer dust and dew,

Rolled into a cloudy little ball of blue; 

Cool and tart, with purple hue – pop! 

Little squirt of juice… and down it goes!

The roiling tablecloth won’t hypnotize these last parts of me away, yet.

But I don't remember who sang that song. Someone who… who…

Loop, loop, loop… They should redecorate the Uptown Café already, and replace these hideous tablecloths, with their circling shapes that are always watching, unshuttered eyes following each stray thought as it unlatches itself from consciousness and drifts away. Those shapes... they look like… look like…

You know what they kind of look like actually? Bland, blank, greyish-white blobs: they remind me somehow, disgustingly, of mushrooms.