Café Sourire
A domestic worker, a student, a software engineer and a single mother walk into a Café.
The domestic worker sits. She runs her hands through her braids and you can read the frustration on her face. She’s run away again. She’s run away from her abusive boss. Her entire life has reeked of poverty but earning a living has not been any easier. This is the third time she’s had to leave an abusive employer but she had sworn to herself she’d rather be homeless than remain in a place where she was constantly abused. Her employer had the keys to all the rooms in the house and believed that he not only had access to the rooms but to her body as well. The sheepish smile on his face and the sound of him humming Katrina and The Waves’ ‘Walking on sunshine’ as soon as he was done. She felt helpless. His girlfriend wasn’t any better. On some days, she would join him. It was as if they had employed her for their own sexual gratification and she had started to believe that she was being punished for the loaf of bread she stole when she was about seven to save her dying mother because surely there had to be a reason why her life was satan’s dark abyss. She clenched her big bag to her chest. It had some of her things, the ones that did not remind her too much of where she just ran from. She didn’t have alot of things anyway, she had always been poor. She was tired of her aimless and endless journey and so she stopped by to have a cup of tea.
The Young student goes to the counter and orders two cups of coffee ‘to go’ and accidently spills half of it on her way out. She can almost hear it, the sound of her mum constantly reminding her that continuing this way would put her in trouble in her husband’s house. She did not understand or care to know the root cause of her clumsiness, all she cared about was making her life an audition to be a wife. She wasn’t even in Uni yet but somehow she had angered her imaginary husband that didn’t exist. She wished her mum could tell her to do things properly for herself sometimes but then again she figured this was her fate as a woman. She was either wife material or a useless whore. NO IN BETWEEN.
When a software engineer was mentioned you probably thought Male. That makes you and all the other people she’s angry at. Is it the “go make a sandwich” jokes or always being introduced as “delectable and stunning" when all she wants is to present her work as such or the one time she was ‘reminded’ that women weren’t fit for her job because she failed one task. The reality of living her dream was making her run mad. She had so much money, she was quite well known but somehow that wasn’t shielding disrespect. She came here to let off steam as it had happened again. A colleague had passed a rude comment and she just needed to he out of the office. This was the nearest place she could find.
The single mother just dropped her son at school and decided to stop by for breakfast. She still wasn’t used to the stares from young and old at her son’s school. They know she’s a young unmarried woman who got pregnant and their eyes always wide with disgust. If eyes had the ability to slutshame then they would be screaming at the top of their irises. She’s heard a comment or two from people and they haven’t been very nice. What’s also not nice is her son’s absent father who doesn’t even have the heart to place a call to his own child. On some days she blames herself, on other days her son is what keeps her going and on rare occasions breakfast at CAFÉ sourire made things better.
Four different women living under the same system.
