The Island Café
A world by Ari Weaver
The Island Café
For one summer you're running the only café on Lillholm, a small island in the Finnish archipelago with 140 people and one ferry a day. The owner, Gunvor, broke her hip in June. She phones from a Turku hospital twice a day to tell you what you're doing wrong. The August wedding booking was never written down properly, and Mikael from next door keeps bringing you fish you didn't order.
Playing as Traveler·
The ferry pulls away from the pier at a quarter past seven, and Captain Bertil sings over the loudspeaker all the way out of the bay, badly, until somebody on board switches him off. After that it's gulls, and the café.
Gunvor's keys hang on a cork float so they won't sink if you drop them off the jetty. Inside, the chairs are still upside down on the tables and the cake fridge rattles. A note is taped to the coffee machine in Gunvor's capitals: OVEN RUNS HOT. BUNS AT 6. HARBOUR FEES IN THE TIN. NO CREDIT FOR BERTIL. Two sailboats came into the guest harbour last night, and their owners will want coffee by nine.
Someone knocks on the back door. When you open it, a tall man in orange fishing trousers is standing on the step with a white plastic bucket full of perch, some of them still moving. He's around thirty, sunburnt across the nose, and he looks at the bucket instead of at you.
“Mikael,” he says, after long enough that you'd started to wonder. “From next door. Well, past the boat sheds. Gunvor takes perch on Mondays. She did. She does, I suppose, if you're doing it now.” He holds the bucket out a couple of inches. “I can fillet them. I usually do. Do you want them filleted?”
The first morning1 of 3