The Nice Café
by Lene MacLeod
Horrific Scribes Extremity Rating:
A whisper of paper drew Willow’s gaze to the door. It was not her door, but she sat on the floor behind it.
On that floor lay a postcard. She scraped it up into her short-fingered hands, and by the brilliant sunlight shining in through the gaps in the boards covering the one-room unit’s sole window, she read the back: We are the nicest! Wish you were here? Come join us at our new location and enjoy a free appetizer on us!
Flipping the card over revealed the glossy image of a white table festooned with plated food items: fancy vegetable arrangements, rich, dark breads surrounding tiny bowls of fluffy dips, chicken wings, and many breaded foods.
Willow had been surviving on the stocked-up food in her cupboards—the cupboards—with only five dollars left to her name while she waited for her seasonal job to begin again. She worked for a cut flower farm on the edge of town, which from this apartment building was only a ten-minute walk. The location was the reason she had holed up here, as she had no means of transportation, not anymore, not since her new life began.
Feasting her eyes upon the postcard image again, she noticed the décor surrounding the table had a floral design. Flowers, she loved them. Not only was she excited about something new to eat, but judging by the look of the restaurant, The Nice Café was run by her kind of people. She supposed, anyway, that if she had people, these would be them. She rose to her feet and began a slow, awkward dance, spinning in a circle that stretched out into a figure eight.
Willow had very little clothing: two sets of black leggings with side pockets and two black, stretchy, long-sleeved T-shirts. She alternated wearing them, washing one outfit in the sink in the janitor’s room late at night. The water had been shut off in the tiny room she occupied ever since she’d crawled up the interior walls of the building, grasping wooden beams and using the same as footholds.
She knew the postcard wasn’t for her. It must have blown down the hallway from the end of the upper floor that was still in decent shape, with a couple of tenants living within. It didn’t matter. Maybe it wasn’t intended for her, but it was meant for her.
The café was two blocks away, past more derelict apartment buildings that petered off to the new builds: condos and a strip mall. She turned into the mall parking lot, found the café, and gazed through the glass of the shiny red door to see a woman standing a few feet away smiling at her. She entered.
The woman was tall and sturdy-looing, with a blonde mane piled atop her head. Willow thought the wide toothy smile faltered for a flash as the hostess took her in—a quick gaze up at the top of her head and down to her Mary Janed feet. The black shoes with a narrow strap were scuffed, but she had no other footwear.
“Welcome to the Nice Café! Table for… just yourself today?”
Willow nodded. “Thank you,” she said. Talking was hard sometimes; she’d barely spoken to anyone since leaving her family home. At first, she exchanged words only with the wandering man. It was he who enabled her to speak at all.
She’d mastered enough of the language to have the courage to approach the flower farm. What she lacked in credentials and work history, she made up for with knowledge—Willow knew flowers.
The hostess led her through the establishment, past smart little tables adorned with vases of flowers along walls painted with meadows bursting with flora. Her kind of place; she knew it would be.
Shortly after being seated at a table tucked in a corner, she got a jolt from a second woman who approached and said, “Welcome. My name is Donna, and I’ll be your server this evening.”
Donna placed a menu and a glass of water on the table and pointed out the placards listing beverages, desserts, and appetizers.
Willow feigned reading over the menu. When Donna returned, she held up the placard listing appetizers and asked if she could order the honey-garlic tofu, but without the garlic.
Donna laughed and gave Willow’s hair a once-over before smiling at her. But her eyes said, You can’t be serious!
“We do make everything fresh—where do you have your hair done? It’s so… unusual.”
Willow was aware her deep-yellow hair looked unnatural. It was not a golden blonde like the hostess’s, not a strawberry blonde like Donna’s. If she ever had the money, she thought she’d buy black hair dye—a match to the strands that grew sporadically on one side of her head. She’d tried yanking out the dark wisps of hair, but their numbers only increased. She cut them short, but they were thick and wild, and chopping them off made the remnants look fuzzy.
“I don’t really go to salons.”
“Aww, yeah. It’s hard to cut and colour your own hair, though, isn’t it?”
All natural. I didn’t choose this. Willow simply nodded.
“Anyway, as I was saying, we do make everything fresh here at the Nice Café, but the tofu is marinated overnight in our secret sauce. Can’t really take the garlic out! How about some cheese sticks or roasted cauliflower to start?”
“The salad. No dressing. And a cup of tea.”
“What kind of tea? We have Darjeeling, Gyokuro,” she said, then, noticing the puzzled look on Willow’s face, added, “Jasmine tea, or Earl Grey? We can do a London Fog with that if you—”
“Jasmine. And honey.”
“Yes?”
“Honey, please.”
“Oh, you’d like some honey for your tea.”
As she waited, Willow detected the mixed aromas of various foods cooking in the kitchen. She at first thought a floral scent would drift through the air, but the flowers set in vases throughout the space were plastic. Fake. Everything here is fake.
Customers flowed in as she waited. Mostly couples or small groups of friends. They all looked… fit, she supposed. Dressed in beige and white, all neat, perfect hair and smiley faces. She could tell they weren’t down to their last few dollars.
Her senses caught something else in the restaurant—voices. Not from the customers who quietly settled in, reading menus, or ate mostly in silence, but from the staff. She heard laughter and murmurs, snarky-sounding voices. She caught fragments of conversation: …her hair? …a vampire! …no garlic… all these with laughter in between. When she looked up at the hostess’s podium, where staff members congregated when they weren’t dashing about, she met bright, wide smiles. Fake.
Willow nibbled at the salad. The crunch-level was good, nice and fresh, but the tea monopolized her interest. She found five packets of honey amongst creamers and milk in the bowl Donna had brought to her. She added them all to the liquid steaming in her cup.
She ate and she tried to ignore the yammering staff. Was it her they were talking about? It was crazy that they were making fun of her when where she came from, she’d always been well-liked. In fact, everyone who knew her either liked her or was indifferent, both equally fine with her.
They must be so bored and desperate and miserable, she told herself. Else why spend their energy ridiculing someone they don’t even know? She considered that maybe they didn’t even like each other, but they were trying to form a superficial bond so perhaps they wouldn’t be the next target. Fake.
Donna’s smile fell for a moment when she cleared away the dishes, and Willow said that she would not be ordering anything else.
“That’s it? Well, you don’t have much of an appetite…” She plastered the smile on, but now it more closely resembled a smirk.
Willow pulled the postcard out of her pocket and handed it to Donna.
“Oh, no, no. This offer requires you to buy a full meal. Didn’t you read the whole thing?” She handed it back to Willow, who read the card again. This time she noticed the fine print at the bottom: one free appetizer when purchased along with an entrée.
Donna dashed off, returning in minutes with the bill.
Willow held the paper up and saw the price of her tea was $4.00, and on the next line was scrawled $25.00.
“What is this for? The twenty-five…”
“I told you that coupon is no good if you don’t order a meal. Twenty-five is for the salad.”
“I don’t have the money,” Willow whispered. Twenty-five for a small garden salad is ridiculous. “I only have enough to pay for the tea. It was a mistake… I—”
“Sure, a mistake!” Donna whizzed away again, returning a moment later.
“Okay, just leave a piece of ID with us and go get the money. We don’t make people wash dishes like you hear about in old movies.” She was smiling her phony smile again.
Willow rocked back and forth in her seat. Sweat gathered at the top of her forehead.
“I don’t have any ID either.”
Donna walked away grumbling. She joined the congregation at the hostess stand. Then she shouted in the direction of the kitchen for someone named André. A tall, heavyset man dressed in white entered the picture. The congregation seemed to be filling him in. Donna pointed to Willow; then she and André marched to her table.
“Where ya live?” Donna snarled.
The man was leaning over the table, and Willow rose from her seat, backing away. She told them her address.
“André will accompany you to your home to retrieve some money, or a piece of ID if you don’t have any money at the moment. If you don’t pay up by end of the week, the manager will be pressing charges.”
Willow wanted to say she had no ID either. Only her name tag from the flower farm business, and she assumed that was no good. But she had to get out of this place, so she walked to the door with André close behind her.
The brazen employees stared at her with smirks, not smiles, on their faces.
As soon as she passed, she heard them say thief… lowlife… trashy…
But it’s a mistake!
She whipped around to confront them. We are the nicest. That was the slogan plastered all over: the menu, the sign outside, the walls. They were nothing but fake and cruel…
But then a waitress said, “Does she think she looks cool? All dressed in black? Or with that hideous hair?”
“Hush, Diana,” another said, “maybe… maybe she’s a mime, or… a poet!”
They laughed more, and Willow rushed out the door.
She walked slowly, wondering what she would do, and when they reached her apartment building—the apartment building—she asked, “Can you wait outside, please? I’ll be quick.”
André frowned, making his way into the small lobby beside the mailboxes. “What number is your apartment?”
Willow told him it was 5F—top floor.
He considered and most likely decided the climb up the staircase wasn’t worth it. “Five minutes. I’ll come up if you don’t get back in time.”
Willow nodded and began the ascent.
“Don’t try anything. I’ll be outside making sure you don’t leave by the back.”
Willow took the steps carefully, her mind lost in the past. Her home, where family and friends all got along. Some were boisterous and danced in the sunshine. She had enjoyed her mild melancholy while she dawdled in the shadows. No one minded. She was a good worker. She was the daughter of a queen.
Her clan had a tendency to die young, though, as she also would have had the wandering man not taken her.
He walked along the forest trails, through forests, along rivers where milkweed and irises and marigold bloomed. He paused always to watch her and her family. Then he wandered off again. Willow’s sister had named him the wandering man.
Willow did not like to use the stairs to reach 5F; someone might spot her. Even in a dying building like this one, tenants cared about what went on, and squatters would be reported. She preferred to climb up inside the walls. And that, she realized, is how she would escape from André. The opening to the outside let out in a narrow space between this building and the next. He’d never see her, and she could disappear through the wooded lot behind the building.
Inside the dim room, Willow gathered her few belongings into a paper sack and made her way to the tiny bathroom, where loosening some tiles revealed her escape passage.
Inside the walls, though, she heard buzzing. Her cousins. All of Willow’s family and community she’d grown up with were long dead, but they had descendants, relatives all over the world. These southern cousins who lived in the beams under the roof of the building seemed a threat until they recognized something within her, something that made her kin.
She was kin, kin even though the wandering man had saved her, extended her life by making her human with his chants and herbs. Traces of who she really was still lingered.
She shouldn’t have to leave this hovel where she felt so comfortable. She crawled down to the outside but didn’t run. She went to face André.
“Let’s go. You have the money?”
“No, I do not have money.”
“The ID?” he asked, giving her a hard look. “Your eyes…what’s wrong with your eyes?”
Willow knew what he was seeing. When she felt threatened or angry, emotions that rarely hit her, her eyes grew dark. She’d seen them once in the bathroom mirror: pure black with faint outlines of dozens of tiny hexagonal lenses. She could see so much better when her eyes transformed—a much wider scope.
“What is that smell? You smell like rotting bananas.” André’s face was pale, his gaze fixed on her eyes.
Willow flapped her arms, up and down, faster, faster until they buzzed and the pheromones exploded from her. She looked up and saw her cousins coming to help.
André ran, but he didn’t get far. Willow’s cousins flew so much faster and stung so much harder than her immediate family had. These cousins, who originated in Brazil and through the generations moved north, eventually making their way to Texas and now even further north, attacked with fury.
When the screaming died down, the thing that had been André lay in a swollen, bloody pile in the weeds. No one looked out the windows; nobody came to his aid. People tended to mind their own business in this neighbourhood.
Willow could go back home now, get ready for her job, which started up again soon, but the voices of the staff at The Nice Café were playing in her head. They wouldn’t stop.
“We’re not quite done yet, dear cousins,” she said, even though the bees wouldn’t understand her spoken words. She performed her dances and expelled her scents to send the signals. The swarm followed her as she walked in the direction of the restaurant. The back of her hands itched, and she scratched at the stiff, straight black hairs erupting from her skin. She felt a familiar irritation all over her body and knew the bright yellow fuzz was growing, too.
“This way, dears. I think I will join in.”
Want another gripping story from Lene MacLeod? Read “Slippers from Hell” in Horrific Scribes December 2025 and “Smashing in the New Year” in Horrific Scribes, January 2026.