A bakery-café, The Forbidden Strawberry, sat on the corner between Streets Elm and Barker. The sidewalks didn't quite meet up the way they should have, causing the place to look almost quirky. The owners of the café, for whatever reason, seemed to avoid that bit of pavement, instead walking on the desire path that had come to be from years of people cutting directly across the bakery's lot from one sidewalk to the other. The café itself was a brick, two-story house built sometime in the mid-nineteen fifties. It was about seventeen hundred square feet in all, two thousand if one were to include the attic and storage basement. The kitchen, one bathroom, and the dining room combined with the larger of the two living areas were the downstairs, where the bakery and business part of the place was. The upstairs, reserved to the residents, had two bedrooms, a bathroom, and a tiny, ten-by-twelve foot living area. It was by no means a large place, seeming even smaller due to the size of the renovated kitchen and large amounts of storage, but it was a home and place of business, dearly loved by both those who lived there and those who came for food and talk. The first-floor interior of the café had a low-budget yet still welcoming feeling to it. White linoleum with light blue, abstractly-floral accents covered the floor. Fake, dark brown “wood planks” ran vertically up and down the walls. Hanging florescent lamps lent light to the place. There were beige fold-up tables and a mix of old, cozy armchairs and metal chairs that also folded up, to be brought out when there were not enough armchairs to seat. An old, solar-powered calculator, a notebook and pencil, and a metal, lock-and-key box secured to the counter to hold the profits took the place of a cash register. Hanging over the door was a hand-painted, wooden sign reading the name of the café, with a large strawberry in the middle and intricate strawberry vines lining the edges of the sign. An intriguing fact about the place was that none of the foods or drinks had any type of strawberry in them; the residents were highly allergic to strawberries and sold nothing with that particular fruit in it, though artificial flavoring might have appeared in some of the pastries and drinks. The owner was a kind, plump woman in her early forties, with vaguely elvish features, kind, dark brown eyes, and smile wrinkles. Her teenage goddaughter and niece looked strikingly like the woman, right down to the elvish-ness and faun brown, mahogany- tinged hair. She was a few inches taller, perhaps, and rather more slender, but she never exceeded five and a half feet. Occasionally, another girl of the same age would go in and help, but she looked somewhat different—hip-length, dark brown hair, eyes matching in color, and lightly tanned skin. While working, they would wear the feminine version of the uniform—a three-quarter-sleeve, faun-brown dress and a white apron—or sometimes just the apron.
The first-floor interior of the café had a low-budget yet still welcoming feeling to it. White linoleum with light blue, abstractly-floral accents covered the floor. Fake, dark brown “wood planks” ran vertically up and down the walls. Hanging florescent lamps lent light to the place. There were beige fold-up tables and a mix of old, cozy armchairs and metal chairs that also folded up, to be brought out when there were not enough armchairs to seat. An old, solar-powered calculator, a notebook and pencil, and a metal, lock-and-key box secured to the counter to hold the profits took the place of a cash register. Hanging over the door was a hand-painted, wooden sign reading the name of the café, with a large strawberry in the middle and intricate strawberry vines lining the edges of the sign. An intriguing fact about the place was that none of the foods or drinks had any type of strawberry in them; the residents were highly allergic to strawberries and sold nothing with that particular fruit in it, though artificial flavoring might have appeared in some of the pastries and drinks.
The owner was a kind, plump woman in her early forties, with vaguely elvish features, kind, dark brown eyes, and smile wrinkles. Her teenage goddaughter and niece looked strikingly like the woman, right down to the elvish-ness and faun brown, mahogany- tinged hair. She was a few inches taller, perhaps, and rather more slender, but she never exceeded five and a half feet. Occasionally, another girl of the same age would go in and help, but she looked somewhat different—hip-length, dark brown hair, eyes matching in color, and lightly tanned skin. While working, they would wear the feminine version of the uniform—a three-quarter-sleeve, faun-brown dress and a white apron—or sometimes just the apron.