Coffee for Six.
Willow Delp
White.
Everything was white in the Unuiĝinta Mondo headquarters—a pearly, glistening color for the waxed marble floors, and a softer, eggshell shade for the walls, both in the conference rooms and the long corridors. A tribute to the fallen White House, in honor of Nordameriko’s wartime contributions, Tamara St. Louis remembered hearing on her first day at the UW. Her roommate, Anahí (having seen the building in many a news photo), wryly snarked that the color represented the type of people the world government served.
Tamara didn’t care much about the decor one way or the other, except that every drop of brown coffee she spilled was painfully obvious against the blank whiteness, like a stain on a clean sheet. She didn’t care much for politics but she wished the floors, at least, could be darker.
Black coffee, white floors — her life was nothing if not contradictions. She worked in the most important building in the post-World War III era as a barista, sneaking peeks of the most powerful people in the Nova Pangea world government: representatives from the six sectors of the world, meeting weekly as she prepared steaming cups of coffee. She understood Esperanto, the de jure universal language, but she struggled with speaking it; the words felt unfamiliar despite practice.
Her notebook itself was a contradiction—a small, black Moleskine thing—old-fashioned (who used pencils and paper in the 2050s?) but filled with Esperanto notes scribbled in the margins, a sign of the times. The language had been meticulously crafted by Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof in the twentieth century, but as the Unuiĝinta Mondo never ceased to remind the populace, it was “the language of the future”.
“Coffee for six,” she said, in tinkling English—it had remained the de facto language, regardless of official status. She could understand tricklings of Esperanto from the room. She heard “ID card,” and “insurgents,” until their voices died in her presence, and the Nordameriko representative—Sinjoro Kennedy—called her to come in. The halls were quiet and largely empty, aside from a smattering of security guards.
Coffee for six — the representatives from Nordameriko, Sudameriko, Eŭropo, Afriko, Azio, and Oceanio, the former continents, now reduced to sectors in the wake of the third world war, the Mondmilito. They watched her with more caution than she was accustomed to — their eyes were bright and narrowed with suspicion, and Tamara couldn’t help but cowing in their presence. It was going to be a long night, she’d heard, and they were sipping coffees as the sun sank in the sky - the clouds streaked with gold.
She left as soon as she could — a glance from an analog clock told her her shift was over, and she never spent more time than necessary in the Unuiĝinta Mondo headquarters in its blinding, intimidating whiteness.
Best to just serve the coffee and disappear.
Tamara stopped on the way to her apartment to pick up rat poison from the pharmacy. The infestation at home was, frankly, getting out of hand, regardless of what Anahí thought. Tamara cringed at the sight of her face on her ID card as she paid — her picture made her look like a skittish fawn of a person, wide-eyed and long-necked with curls of black hair dangling in front of her dark eyes. A swipe, and she placed it back into her wallet — mentally reminding herself to get a new photo taken. This was not who she wanted the world to see.
When she returned home, Anahí was, as usual, seated in front of her laptop; she was chattering in Guaraní, her native language, with fellow indigenous Sudamerikans. Tamara had tried to learn some, and she could recognize a few basic phrases, but she had no talent for languages. Guaraní didn’t surround her like Esperanto did — it hadn’t created a net around her world, trapping her, her life jam-packed with Unuiĝinta Mondo and Eŭropo and Sinjoro. It only really felt like English and Esperanto anymore… Everything else had been discarded after the war, criticized for its decisiveness, while Esperanto’s and English’s collective status remained as a smorgasbord of other languages: perfect for a united world, a world finally at everlasting peace.
Anahí hung up as Tamara was eating dinner. Her beam lit up the apartment as she rambled about her friends, and about language, and her job, and Tamara listened, soaking it in over leftover pasta. Expressed sentimentality always felt tinged with awkwardness, but Tamara had to admit that she had never cared about anyone as much as she cared about Anahí.
“What’s going on at the headquarters?” Anahí asked, walking to the fridge, her trademark citrus-scented perfume wafting through the kitchen air.
“Just ID card stuff, mention of insurgents—”
Anahí laughed. “Insurgents. They’re calling us that again?”
“You’re an advocate for language preservation, I wouldn’t call you an insurgent. You’re not hurting anyone by keeping Guaraní alive—”
She laughed again. “Mm-hmm, tell that to the reps. I think they’d think differently.”
“Anahí, I know you don’t like them, but I think they’re mostly reasonable—”
“They’re pushing cultural hegemony. Wake up, Tamara, do you see how they’re eradicating languages in favor of this stupid con-lang shit? Changing the education system? I’m an insurgent for speaking my own damn language — because they don’t care about universalism, they want European culture. Come on now, don’t be obtuse. You should know this—you see this every day. They want white.”
Tamara didn’t have a response for that. She nodded and stared at her own hands, her skin brown as coffee.
#
It came in the mail the next morning.
New ID card with Anahí’s face and the name Ava Brown. To replace her expired card. Anahí screamed when she saw it.
Tamara had slept relatively peacefully, dreamt of iced coffee pools, and was jolted awake by the sound of frantic, desperate, furious screaming, and the thick stench of smoke.
“What the hell’s going on?” Tamara asked, rubbing her eyes, stumbling into the kitchen. The door had been swung wide open to reveal Anahí, standing on the balcony, a lighter in hand, with her new ID card in flames.
Tamara’s eyes widened in abject shock.
“I’m not Ava-fucking-Brown,” Anahí said, her eyes glowing like embers, “Tamara, this fucking government says that my name is Ava-fucking-Brown. I am Anahí Bobadilla—I’m burning this ID card, fucking hell—how dare they—”
“I have to go to work,” Tamara muttered, her brain clouded with sleepiness. A crowd had begun to amass underneath the balcony, and she dreaded to think how her landlord would react. “Anahí, they’re gonna call you an insurgent.”
“What if I am?”
“You’re gonna get in trouble,” Tamara said tiredly, standing in a robe and slippers on the balcony, feeling out-of-place as the cool morning wind ruffled her hair. “Just report the mistake to the government, they’ll correct it.”
“This was no mistake,” Anahí spat, focused on the fire. Tamara tried to pull her away, but she held her ground. “They’re erasing us. They’re gonna erase you too.”
Tamara glanced down the balcony—listened to a symphony of angry chants, of a mob screaming Insurgent! Insurgent!—and stared at her roommate, pityingly. She wanted to tell her to go inside, tell her that she was causing a disturbance, and that she needed to calm down, but she didn’t have the heart to say anything. She nodded in acknowledgment of the commotion, squeezed Anahí’s hand for a moment, and went outside with a quiet, “I hope you get a correct ID card soon.”
“That’s not the point,” Anahí said, but she didn’t argue, and Tamara took it as a compromise.
#
Work was painfully loud—bustling with confusion and chaos, reporters striding through hallways, microphones abound—and Tamara paused as she opened the door, listening to the cacophony of noise, her mouth gaping as the white sheet began to feel crumpled. She listened to the Nordameriko representative speak in front of a reporter wielding a camera.
“It’s confusing, disharmonious, and divisive when identification cards don’t have an English or Esperanto name,” Sinjoro Kennedy said, every word deliberate. “The corrections have already begun.”
The corrections? Tamara thought, but the hallways were too crowded to stand around reflecting. She walked towards the kitchen and bumped briefly into the representative from Afriko.
“I’m so sorry, Sinjoro Nwaokocha,” Tamara stammered, and he looked at her with dark, tired eyes.
“Sinjoro N,” he said, his shoulders slumped and his suit rumpled. With a brief nod, he strode away.
She brought them the coffee again, but it was different this time; the floors were scuffed with reporters’ shoes, and armed police lined the hallways. There had been increased insurgence since the new ID cards had been rolled out, and increased security response. Tamara could hear more—Sinjoro Nwaokocha really was Sinjoro N to them now, Sinjorino Silva was Sinjorino Silver, Sinjoro Li was Sinjoro L. Tamara’s skin prickled with unease.
Familiar phrases floated through the air: “global unity,” and “harmony,” and “for the good of Nova Pangea,” and “insurgents”—again and again—and she felt like her head was spinning. The Esperanto notes in her notebook seemed to be emboldening, their ink somehow darkening.
Will they let me keep Tamara? she wondered, and the familiar caffeine scent tasted like noxious fumes in the madness. Sinjoro Wilson of Eŭropo, and Sinjorino Williams of Oceanio had apparently backed the measure too, and she felt herself trembling in the frenzy. The representatives … none of them looked the same anymore—less distinguished politicians, more... something else entirely. The thought tasted bitter.
When her hands steadied, she served them all coffee.
It was a deal, she learned, when she returned home: a quid-pro-quo, to allocate more aid to South Nova Pangea in exchange for support from the Sudameriko, Azio, and Afriko—the usual dissenters, and the sectors with the lowest average incomes. Anahí wasn’t there, for whatever reason. Tamara texted her, and she didn’t respond. Likely just out and about, too busy to check her phone, Tamara presumed as she flicked through the news on her tablet.
Names for aid, she thought over dinner, perhaps isn’t the worst that could happen.
Nobody would be materially harmed, even if it was insulting and, she had to admit, disgusting. But Anahí would calm down, and she would come home.
The clock ticked into midnight. Tamara sent out a missing person report for Anahí Bobdailla, but at the officer’s behest, she asked if they could find an Ava Brown. Guilt clawed at her stomach. She didn’t want some whitewashed caricature of her friend; she wanted Anahí, in all of her blistering beauty.
ID cards were usually used in these cases, but Anahí’s had been reduced to a pile of angry ash, and Tamara sent them a picture of her roommate with a desperate plea. Her face in the photo glowed with exuberance—a smile stretched across golden brown skin, her dark eyes glittered like obsidian, and her long black hair was tied in a carefree ponytail. It was Tamara’s favorite photo of her: the kind of Anahí that spent nights joking around with her roommate, laughing at low-budget movies and sharing popcorn, huddling together on the couch.
That Anahí would come back to Tamara.
She had to.
#
A disappointing daylight broke. The sun’s rays felt pityingly weak through the window, and Tamara yawned and stretched, walked over to the balcony to taste the cool morning air.
Taped to the table read a note in a familiar font —it was the font all government documents used, not to the public but between themselves. Tamara had helped distribute memos before, and the sans serif had been long etched into her brain.
A lock of black hair was taped to the note.
“Pay for your fire,” it read. “Insurgence will be punished.”
She held it for barely a moment until her hands trembled violently, until she couldn’t hold on anymore, and it drifted away in the breeze.
Tamara’s thoughts became dizzying and nonsensical as she sank to her knees, sobs shaking her body and screams escaping from her throat. The sound shredded the morning silence. She couldn’t count how many minutes she kneeled on the balcony ground—a crying, shrieking mass. A familiar scent was her only company.
Anahí’s hair smelled like citrus perfume, as pungent as the stink of a corpse.
#
After an eternity, she dried her eyes through hiccups, then rose to her feet. Her hands curled into fists.
She grabbed her things for work: her purse, her ID card, her Moleskine notebook, and her pharmacy purchase—rat poison.
She couldn’t bring back her roommate. But she could make her proud.
Her representatives. They had done this.
Brown. The color of coffee tainted with rat poison. The substance was invisible, blended seamlessly, rendering the drink indistinguishable from any other one she’d served.
“Coffee for six!” she said, knocking on the Unuiĝinta Mondo conference room.
About the Author.
Willow Page is a Jamaican-American writer, reader, and student.
Interview with the Author.
The concept of a post-World War III world and the rise of a romantic langue-centric Esperanto-speaking society is super interesting to me, as a linguist. How did you land on Esperanto as the de facto language, and how do you think the setting might be different if the common language wasn’t as Eurocentric?
I’m interested in language and linguistics, so I naturally gravitated to Esperanto as I was intrigued by its attempts to be a universal language when its foundations were so Eurocentric. To me, that is the heart of the story – the misconception that what is European is universal, and the consequences of that fallacious belief.
The relationship between Tamara and Anahí is so important to help define the world and the relationships between cultures in this new societal structure. What do you want readers to take from their relationship, at its core?
Their relationship, to me, is definitely on the border of romantic and platonic – there are some undeniably homoerotic underpinnings. I wanted to keep it deliberately a bit ambiguous. There’s absolutely a lot of love there, and it can be interpreted in multiple directions.
What do you imagine happened / happens / will happen to the world after Tamara’s actions at the end of the story?
I imagine that there will be a reconfiguration of global power. Whether for better or worse is for the reader to decide.
If you had to pick any single thing that your readers would take from this story, what would it be?
I would definitely advise readers to be cautious of efforts towards “unity” that ignore the diversity inevitable in heterogeneous groups on both a macro and micro level. When a compromise is made, whose interests are being represented at the forefront, and whose interests are being ignored for the so-called “greater good”? Also, be very watchful of who the state demonizes.
What is something about this story that your readers might not pick up on the first read? Or, what do you as the author want your readers to know about this story?
I want readers to know that the ideas expressed in “Coffee for Six” don’t just exist in the abstract – the erasure of people of color is a problem rooted in history, and one that has caused immense harm to Black and Indigenous people. If you are discomfited by this story, then act on your discomfort. Erasure of culture is the first step to erasure of people.