Hanging Premonition

It smells icky and strange. An orange glow welcomes me as I step in. Not the usual soothing rusty mat orange that Per takes so much pride in having us wear everyday. “I despise Baristas wearing black, they look like Dark Metal wannabes”, he told me once, when I dared asking why we all looked like Buddhist monks. Today, the Mormors Café smells oozing and gross, like the insides of an old sponge, and everything glows. A nasty vanGoghish glow.

– FALL! Per cries out while I am nervously juggling with my bike’s chain lock, one metal ring strangling my middle finger.

– What’s falling? Chemical waste? Exotic spores? Some angry goddess unamused by our themed menu just threw up her Ragnarökappuccino on us?

I let go of my chain. My finger aches. I was surprised by the haunted house setting. I need to have a conversation with Per. But then the glow. But then the smell.

My boss takes my hands emphatically, as if we were auditioning for the Opera. Faust comes to mind. Or Der Ring des Nibelungen. Something with melting gold and guilt and possibly the Styx.

– I’m experimenting seasonal syrups! Pumpkin, carrot, sweet potato, saffron… everything orange.

– Arsenic? Lobster mushroom?

Per hired me on the spot when I told him I enjoyed putting orgeat syrup in my coffee. He did not know anything about orgeat at that time. He did not know much about syrups. Since then, he became the Dr. Frankenstein of liqueurs, some delicious, some horrendous. He likes everything sirupy, really, from Vietnamese schmaltzy songwriting to French chocolate moëlleux or German May Wine.

How can I tell him about us?

– Come on, it doesn’t smell that bad! he protests.

His hands feel both rough and sweaty, as a cat’s tongue, as if he were experimenting on cat tongues and equatorial frogs and slugs. I gently go away. He becomes touchy-feely when he is experimenting on food. With the rest of the staff, we suspect he feeds off some mystical substance seeping from our pores.

– It smells like my grand-mother’s teeth, I offer.

Ulrika comes in, red from the wind. Göteborg is a raging maelstrom. I could hardly bike my way along the fish harbor. The seagulls act weird. Even weirder than in June, when they are dizzy from the never setting sun and some algae.

Ulrika waves at us and goes straight to our precious Bezzera, a Hungarian espresso machine, an outrageous golden samovar-looking warhead crowned by a flying eagle. A piece of continental extravaganza embedded in the scandinavian everything-else decor of the Mormors Café like a cyst.

Ulrika makes herself an espresso. The thick liquid pours its way out of the baroque contraption with a dramatic hiss. We all fall quiet. I hang my jacket over the heap of forgotten coats. It flops down a few times before sticking to a humpy position. When fall begins, customers tend to forget a lot more. It is cold when they get in, warm when they get out; we have a heap.

Ulrika stops the machine and swallows her ristretto like a vodka.

– What with the smell? she asks, frowning. We forgot to empty the compost bin, again?

Am I the only one who sees the glow?

Per runs to Ulrika and takes her hands.

– I’m experimenting seasonal syrups! he sings. Pumpkin, carrot, sweet potato, saffron… everything orange.

Oh no. Faust again.

As Per is turning his back to me, I slowly shake my head to Ulrika. I didn’t have time to have that conversation. But she does not look my way. I feel instantly very stupid and slid behind the bar to slip into my outfit and brush the counter.

The orange overall makes me feel like the agent of a public health agency, investigating air pollution.

The flickering glow seems to originate from the kitchen. It forms a sparkling cloud reminding me of this short film by Akira Kurosaswa. Mount Fuji in Red, I think it was called. An old man wanders among nuclear clouds and vapors, each one strangely colorized according to its signature isotope. “radiations are colorless, says someone, maybe the old man. We have colored them so that we know from which cancer we shall die”.

I bite my tongue in an inexplicable anguish. As if struck by a premonition.

We hear something bubbling and Per rushes to the kitchen. Ulrika joins me and awkwardly grabs my fingers.

Our first costumer gets in. It is Saga, the pastor from the church opposite the street. She often writes her sermon at Mormors. But it is the wrong day. I panic. Her unexpected arrival may lead to complications; Saga does not know that Per does not know.

– Tall Latte? I politely ask.

– No thank you, Maryam, I had already two pots of coffee, she replies politely in Farsi.

Saga learned Farsi in the 1990s. She fell in love with a Darius. He disappeared. She never explained how.

Then, back in Swedish for everybody's sake:

– Oh my God, what with the smell? Sewer problems again?

– I hate you, Saga! Per screams from the kitchen.

Jingling. Clinking.

– You don’t happen to see an ominous orange glow, do you? I ask Saga in Farsi.

The pastor looks around her, stupefied, as if I had ask her to help me find my lost goat and were pretending, to please me, that goats were a common thing in Göteborg.

– I… just wondered if I could use your WiFi. Internet doesn’t seem to work at the church.

– Nope, Ulrika says, checking on her phone. Nothing.

– I’ll reset the modem! Per shouts from the other room.

And then, just like that, the orange glow vanishes.

I freeze.

Per joins us.

I am ice cold. This premonition again. I rush to my bag and open my Hafez poetry book at a random page.

– "Mountainous ocean, a moon hidden behind clouds, The terror of being drawn under", I read out loud.

Ulrika and Saga know what I have just done. Fal-e Hafez. Our traditional divination method: picking up a random poem from Hafez in order to foresee the future. 

Per is utterly puzzled.

– Right, he says, clapping his wet palms in embarrassment.

– Back online! proclaims Ulrika.

The cloud instantly reappears, thicker, raging, unhappy, glowing.

– So, about your wedding…, Saga starts.

The cloud is so dense. All I can see is a big orange blur.

– You two are getting married? Per says, dumfounded, just before the

BANG