She just needs something interesting…
Iris gets bored. Easily. In a way that no one can explain. Not medical doctors. Not esoteric healers. Not supposed witches. A staticky feeling under her skin forces a restlessness through her and she has to move. And despite years of searching, answers to her problem elude her. The restlessness makes basic life things, like jobs and apartment rentals, difficult. But without answers, Iris has no choice but to just do her best to live her life.
Stumbling into the café next to the bookstore should have occupied her attention for a few minutes before the cliché of it all sent her back into the streets, looking for something, anything to calm the static energy under her skin.
But something about the café proves unexpected. Different. Interesting.
And maybe, just maybe, a little magical.
IRIS AT THE CAFE is available to read for free until the 1st of December, when another story will be posted. For readers who would prefer to read on a device of preference, or who would like their own personal eBook of this story, you can find it here.
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Iris at the Café
A Café Story
Bookstores attached to coffee shops, or the other way around, however you wanted to think about it, bookstore and coffee shop combinations were so cliché as to be a little ridiculous. But still, Iris found herself moving from the adorable independent bookstore into the attached independent coffee shop once she’d picked up the book she wanted for class.
It wasn’t that she didn’t like coffee and pastries and coffee shops in general. But typically, they were so ordinary. And Iris got bored so easily. She found it hard to find a place that was interesting enough to visit more than once or twice. Her brain seemed to work at a speed that made settling in anywhere hard. Without new experiences regularly, she found herself…tired.
Maybe that wasn’t the right word. She’d never really been able to pinpoint the problem. Just that she seemed to need more stimulus than other people.
Probably had to do with the sparking electricity under her skin. Not like static or anything. The last time she’d tried to talk to someone about it, she’d compared it to magic but without any oomph behind it. No ability to do magic. Just that sparking energy that made her skin uncomfortable on her own body if she didn’t move regularly and find new experiences regularly.
This did make settling into any one apartment, town, or city pretty difficult. And since everywhere required contracts for multiple months rental, finding places to live had proven difficult. She’d gotten around the whole thing by making sure to change up her furniture arrangement and even her furniture regularly to make the space feel different.
She took classes at whatever university or college happened to be near her because they kept her mind active and rolling through new concepts and ideas. That helped too. If she kept learning, she didn’t get bored as fast and that electrical feeling under skin remained manageable.
Iris would have liked to have had an explanation for all this energy and restlessness and easy boredom, but none of her classes, research, or conversations with various people had every pointed her in a direction for that information. She’d tried psychologists and therapists and had thought at one point it was ADHD. Friends over the years had assumed that was all it was. But it turned out she didn’t have those markers. They’d tried some prescriptions anyway, but nothing really worked. She’d gotten a few different opinions from medical professionals and nothing panned out with a way to help her settled.
Then she’d gone the more unconventional route and went looking into esoteric explanations. None of the supposed psychics and witches she’d gone to were able to provide her with much help. She was deemed “mundane” and therefore her restlessness problem and the static under her skin was something a mundane doctor had to help her with.
In the end, after years of searching and getting no real concrete answers, she’d just found ways as best she could to deal with her nature and gotten on with her life.
Jobs were tough, though. She just got so bored so easily. And any of the jobs in which she could see not getting bored did require her to have some sort of stable living condition and remain in one city for longer than six months. So that’s what she was working on at the moment. Ways to stay in the same location without that electrical feeling getting so uncomfortable she had to move again.
The only good thing was her restlessness and easy boredom didn’t seem to affect other people. The electricity under her skin that fed the restlessness wasn’t like real electricity—or magic—to jump out and interact with other people or beings. It didn’t seem to be real in that way. It was just her. A kind of ghost sensation. Something she felt and that drove her, but had no other physical manifestation.
Which was good. It meant she could still have a good relationship with her parents, her sister, because modern life and technology meant she could talk to them whenever she wanted, message regularly, and visit all the time. Short term visits were best but she could do that so long as the visits were never quite the same. And she could maintain familial relationships. No need to push anyone away.
At least none of her immediate family.
Relationships with friends and romantic partners was a little more complicated. And almost always short term.
But that was a problem she could deal with once she dealt with the problem of regular work.
Temp work had been fine for a while. Never too long in one place. Different types of jobs. But eventually, the types of jobs started to feel alike. The different offices, different locations, even in different cities with different people, started to feel a little same same. And those jobs got harder to stick out if they were for longer than a day or two. Long term assignments were beyond her. Which meant her finances were always in flux. And those longer term contracts for accommodation were difficult to get because she didn’t have stable finances.
She couldn’t go on this way indefinitely. At least, she didn’t want to. She wanted some stability at some point in her life. She just had to find a way to do that that didn’t make her want to crawl out of her skin.
She wasn’t going to find those answers in the coffee shop next to the cute independent bookstore, but she could at least have a nice drink and maybe a pastry in a new place and sit for a few minutes with her new book and experience the place like it wasn’t a cliché, experience it and the people like it was all new.
The woman at the counter greeted her with a smile. And a nice unique touch to the café sat on a small stool, just outside the counter, next to the register. A giant Maine Coon with the fluffiest gray fur and pale pale blue eyes. The cat was curled up on the too small stool like it was the most comfortable perch, despite the fact that so much of his body seemed to be hanging off the edges of the stool. The cat blinked those pale eyes at her but otherwise seemed indifferent to her presence.
Iris had always liked bodega cats, but this was her first café cat. She’d read about cafés with lots of cats. She should find some of those one day.
She asked the woman behind the counter for recommended food and drink, and ordered things she’d never tried before—a Macha mocha latte and a chocolate lava cake with ganache. That last seemed like something she should have had before but hadn’t so it joined the list of new experiences.
Once she had her order, she scanned the coffee shop for a seat. One near the front window, a set of couches with a coffee table-like table between them, seemed like a good idea. From there she could watch the sidewalk, the bookstore, and the people in the café for anything interesting to keep her attention.
A few people had mistaken her when she talked about her restlessness and easy boredom as an inability to sit still. But she could sit still. That was especially true when there were interesting things to watch. The restlessness was more of the mind and it only translated to the body when her mind didn’t have anything fun to do.
Apparently, her mind was a restless and obstinate child that needed lots of stimulation or it made her skin staticky. But so long as her mind was busy with things that amused it, she could sit for hours.
She sipped the Macha mocha latte and was pleasantly surprised—any new sensation was good but experiencing bad new sensations, like an unpleasant taste, were not top of her list. The mix of that faintly grassy Macha flavor with a bit of bitter chocolate and all the milk was surprisingly good. Not as sweet or grassy as she’d feared. Perfect balance. She focused on the drink, on each sip, on the different flavors that came in and out, playing differently on her tongue with each drink. Wow, that was nice. That was really nice. Especially the way the balance kept changing. Sometimes she got a bit more of the Macha, that earthy flavor, and sometimes more of the mocha, which was like getting the occasional hit of unsweetened cocoa powder, but good. The way the cocoa hit the tip of her tongue and made a sharp sensation was a delightful experience. And just when she thought she’d gotten a hold of the flavor, the milk would sort of rise to the top and provide a rich hit of luscious dairy to the whole thing.
Really really good drink.
As she enjoyed the changing flavors and mixes and balance of the latte, she scanned the café. And was a little surprised by the clientele. The guy in the back writing on a laptop was pretty cliché, so her gaze kind of skimmed over him, though she found herself glancing back. He actually seemed to be really writing and not just pretending. And he kept looking up from the keyboard to stare into the middle distance. His brows would raise, and then he’d go back to frantically typing. Like he was in a race to get down everything that had just popped into his head.
She found herself wondering if he was writing something boring like a report for work, or if he was a fiction writer. Maybe non-fiction but something weird and fun. Like about animals maybe. Her brain occupied itself for several long minutes wondering what the man might be writing and that was a nice diversion. Then she went back to scanning the café.
An older woman with steel gray hair pulled back into a low bun and a neat outfit of a pale pink blouse and black wide-legged trousers sat in the middle of the café, at one of the wooden tables with wooden chairs that didn’t look nearly as comfortable as the couches and cushioned seats around the perimeter of the café. The woman had a cup on a saucer in front of her on the table, so Iris assumed she was drinking tea. And she was reading a book. It took Iris a few minutes of watching before the woman shifted the book in a way that Iris could see the title and cover. There seemed to be a tentacled monster of some kind embracing a human woman, the woman looking enraptured, her arms wrapped around one of the monster’s tentacles.
Well. That was unexpected. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected the older woman to be reading. Someone drinking tea and dressed with such simple elegance, who seemed to embody primness and maturity, reading a monster romance.
Unexpected. Cool.
The woman sipped her tea without ever looking up from her book. And Iris appreciated that level of concentration. Especially with a noisy café moving around her. Iris watched her for a few minutes then let her gaze continue wandering around the place. It was a weekday, so a little quiet, but there were still quite a few people moving in and out. The steady stream of different people to glance at was actually quite nice.
A woman with an extremely tall man walked into the café from the outside. He scanned the place before motioning to a seat near the back, not far from the writer and a group of teenagers who were just gathering their things to leave. The woman gave him a nod and then went to the counter. The man was probably seven foot tall if he was an inch and looked a little… Well, scary wasn’t quite the right word. He wasn’t what you might call attractive, either though. In the wrong light, he might even look a little scary with the harsh angles cut into his face. But it was more an intensity. Or something. Anyway, Iris wouldn’t want to mess with him. And apparently no one else did either, because despite a few people looking at him and whispering, no one approached him.
The significantly smaller woman who’d walked in with him was dressed all in black and had her dark hair pulled back in a braid. She was a pretty enough woman, but not someone that stood out or was too obvious. She had the kind of face that…blended in. Looked like a lot of people and so didn’t actually stand out in a crowd. Iris thought she was a bit like that. Nothing about her own face really stood out in a crowd either, in either a good or bad way. She was ordinary looking in a mildly pleasant but unremarkable way. Which suited her because it made her restlessness and need to constantly change things up significantly less obvious.
The woman at the counter chatted easily with the woman behind the counter and gave the giant Maine Coon a little scritch around the head as she waited for her drinks. Then she walked back to the man carrying two mugs, one with a tea bag string hanging over the side. They settled in and leaned close to talk, and Iris lost interest in them, her gaze skimming on to other things. But she did think in passing that they were a cute couple even if their size difference struck her as…complicated.
A young man with a guitar walked in and settled into the nook between the counter and the front window with his coffee mug. The moment he moved from warm up chords on the guitar to actually softly playing music, the Maine Coon jumped off his small stool and up onto the arm rest of the guitar player’s chair. The cat’s head bopped around to the music which was funny enough and weird enough it kept Iris’s attention for the full length of two songs. The cat even meowed in time to the music occasionally. And Iris found her own head bopping to the rhythm. None of it was anything she’d heard before, and it suited her musical tastes, so she very much enjoyed watching the guitar player and the cat for a little while.
When she got bored with that, she glanced down at her cellphone and realized she’d been well occupied with her people watching just inside the café for a half hour. To have thirty minutes pass in something like people watching without getting restless and ready to move on was…kind of amazing.
She felt that little bit more settled too, she realized. The energy under her skin, that jumpiness and static had calmed. She’d never had that happen when she was just people watching. There was usually enough to keep her brain occupied for a maximum of ten minutes before the restlessness crept back in. She only ever really felt this settled when she was deep in a new subject and had lots and lots to learn. Or when things around her were so different to anything she’d ever experienced, her brain had lots to focus on. Keeping her brain busy and curious and learning almost always cut the discomfort under her skin down to near nothing. But she’d never had that experience just watching people come and go. Not for this long anyway.
Huh. Kinda cool.
She realized she hadn’t touched the lava cake yet, either, but she’d nearly finished the Macha mocha latte. Dragging her fork down through the cake, she smiled at the thick chocolate sauce spilling out. Exactly what she’d have expected from a lava cake and she would have been disappointed if it hadn’t spilled chocolate everywhere.
The flavor of the chocolate was rich, and sweet, but not too sweet. That surprised her. She’d expected a lot of sweetness from the sauce and the ganache on top of the cake, but instead, there was a little bitterness underneath that balanced everything. That heavier cocoa flavor that cut through sugar. Each bite was a little different, too. Some with more ganache, some with more sauce, others with almost all the spongy, moist cake. The experience of eating that lava cake defied her usual experience with sweets and she devoured the treat, but slowly, savoring each bite.
What an unexpected café this was turning out to be. She liked it. She liked it a lot.
The sidewalk outside was busy, with lots of different people passing as well as cars trundling down the street. A series of black SUVs passed, which struck her as strange and interesting. She wondered if they were together or that was just a coincidence. Some coincidence if it was.
There was man kind of hovering around, then going up to someone at the bus stop, a young woman. Who spoke to him with her attention on the traffic. Iris couldn’t see her expression, because of the angle of the bus stop. Just the back of her head where she sat on the bench inside the clear glass walls of the stop’s shelter. With the man paying so much attention to the woman and the woman clearly uncomfortable, Iris was about to stand up and go check on the woman.
Before she could, another woman got between them. A blond with her hair pulled back into a ponytail, wearing a battered brown leather jacket. She stepped directly in front of the sitting woman and started talking to the man. The man’s face, which Iris could see, turned red and he started yelling. The woman in the leather jacket just smiled and stood unbothered as the man tried to get into her face. She didn’t move an inch or raise her hands to protect herself.
The man raised a hand and Iris stood, ready to run out and help.
The woman tilted her head a little as the man swung at her and…missed completely. Like so completely it was ridiculous. He swung around in a circle and then folded over his arm. Like he’d made contact with something and had hurt himself. Except that what Iris witnessed was a man taking a swing at a woman and not getting anywhere close to even grazing her.
The woman shook her head at him and said something. Iris almost went outside just so she could hear what the woman in the leather jacket was saying. The man snarled up at her, then turned and stalked away, still cradling his hand. He passed right in front of the café as he went. And for a moment, Iris thought he might walk inside, but then she realized the barista who’d been behind the counter just a moment ago was standing in the doorway now. The door was open, letting in all the beeps and honks of traffic, the rumble of cars, the noise of pedestrians. The sound of the bus hissing as it stopped next to the bus shelter.
Over all that noise, Iris still heard the man demand to come in and use the phone, and the barista shaking her head.
She glanced at the bus stop. Iris followed her gaze. The woman who’d been harassed by the man was getting on the bus, saying something to the woman in the leather jacket who was waving her away. The bus doors closed and the bus trundled down the block, the bus stop woman safely away. Meanwhile, the barista was telling the guy cradling his hand that the café was closed—which it was clearly and obviously not—and he’d have to find another business with a phone.
The man shouted some curse words at the barista, who didn’t move or even flinch. The noise did have the woman in the center of the café who was reading a monster romance look up and over. She raised a brow, nodded, and went back to her book.
The Maine Coon had leapt off the chair next to the guitar player and gone to stand at the barista’s feet, weaving around her legs a couple of times before sitting down right next to her. The cat was so large that when he sat, his head nearly reached the barista’s knee.
The shouting man eventually waved his uninjured arm at the barista and stalked away.
She stayed in the doorway watching him go. The woman in the leather jacket joined her and the two started talking as if they knew each other, though murmuring so low, Iris couldn’t hear them even though they were quite close to her. The barista gave the woman in the jacket a nod and they both came inside. The cat rubbed up against the brown jacket woman, then returned to the guitar player, who’d also been watching the incident.
The barista got the brown jacket woman a coffee and the brown jacket woman went to sit at a table not far from the woman reading the monster romance. The two gave each other a brief nod, but that was the extent of their interaction. Once seated, the brown jacket woman took out her phone and started scrolling, and the monster romance woman went back to reading.
Iris slowly settled back into her seat as everything around her settled again. The momentary drama done. She had no real idea what had happened and how the man had hurt himself taking a swing at the woman in the brown jacket, but it was obvious he’d been trouble. And watching all the various people step in to help had been wonderful. She was curious about the woman in the brown leather jacket now, too. Someone who obviously came here often enough that she knew the barista and the cat.
After a few minutes, when nothing else exciting happened, Iris realized she needed to stop staring at the woman in the brown leather jacket and turned her attention outside again. When she glanced at her phone to check the time, another half hour had gone by.
No staticky feeling. No itching to get up and getting moving yet.
Just from people watching. Interesting people here.
She turned back to the window but the usual movement of people and traffic wasn’t disrupted by strange interactions this time and she turned her attention back to the café. Another coffee sounded nice. Maybe just a simple something? Then she could enjoy that and leave and know she’d spent a few hours without the restlessness and without having to bury herself in intense study.
When she reached the counter, the cat jumped off the armchair next to the guitarist again and ambled close. He did a little circle around her, rubbing his fur against her legs. She could feel the static through her jeans, but it was a nice sort of static. Tickled rather than made her restless. After exactly two circles, the cat jumped up onto his too small stool next to the counter and began licking his paw, not even deigning to look at her.
Okay. She had no idea what that was about. She gave the cat a funny look then turned her attention to the barista. “Recommend anything else interesting? That Macha mocha was delicious.”
“I’m so glad to hear that.” The woman grinned and it was a genuine, pleased smile. “It’s my most exotic drink at the moment. But I have a passion fruit syrup that goes well with a latte, if you’re interested in trying that? Not very many people take to them, but they’re an interesting flavor.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I’ll try that.” Iris had come up here with the expectation of getting just a normal latte or cappuccino or something. But adding a little additional interest to it sounded good. “I’m surprised you didn’t ask why I didn’t order another Macha mocha.”
The woman waved that away as Iris paid for her drink. “You just struck me as someone who likes to try new and different drinks. But if you want another Macha mocha later, I’ll happily make you another.” She smiled. “My name is Nina, by the way.” She tapped the name tag on her green apron that Iris hadn’t looked at earlier.
“Iris.”
“Welcome to the café, Iris.”
The coffee with passionfruit syrup was weird and interesting and maybe not Iris’s favorite combination, but was also strange enough that she spent a while sipping and tasting and deciding how she felt about the flavor combination. Interesting, even if not quite to her taste, was always better than boring.
After she finished her second coffee, she realized she’d been able to comfortably hang out in this café, without obsessively reading or studying, for a couple of hours. Without the sparking energy under her skin getting to her. And she felt…relaxed. Not frantic. Not pushed to keep doing. Comfortable. Wow, when was the last time she’d felt like that?
It was such a pleasant sensation that that occupied her brain for another few minutes.
Finally, though, the restlessness returned after finishing her strange passion fruit latte and skimming through the book she’d bought next door. The people in the café weren’t doing anything particularly interesting anymore. Though the music from the guitar player was captivating. He kept changing things up and shifting genres or blending genres that shouldn’t go together. That was fun. She understood why the resident cat kept hanging out with the guitarist. But when he packed up and left, that diverting sound went with him.
Ah well. It was nice while it lasted.
She gathered her things to get ready to leave. Pausing when the giant Maine Coon walked up to her. He rubbed against her leg, which surprised her. She’d read that meant a cat was claiming you. Or accepting you. Or something. She waited to see what he would do, and when he simply leaned into her leg—heavy enough to make his gravity known—she reached down and gave him a scratch around the head. A soft, rumbling purr rose from somewhere deep inside all that fluffy pale gray fur. The sound was soothing, and she could almost feel it on her fingertips as she scratched under the cat’s chin.
Minutes passed as she petted him, enjoying the feel of soft fur against her fingertips.
The ever-present energy under her skin had eased off again. So far back that she barely felt it. Maybe the cat’s purring had some magic in it. She chuckled to herself at the thought.
Though, to be fair, the whole café had had more of a magical feel to it than she would have expected. Things happening around her, subtle and blatant. Interesting food and drink that she hadn’t expected. Characters walking in and out that gave her something to actually watch. She’d walked into this place thinking it was a cliché—a café attached to a bookstore—and that she’d get bored. But remarkably, she hadn’t been bored. Not once since walking in.
Nothing huge had happened. Unless she counted the man who’d been denied entrance and who’d apparently hurt his hand on nothing. But for the most part, just interesting people walking in and out. Hanging out. The music had been wonderful. And she’d enjoyed herself.
Huh. Who would have thought she’d find such a long period of relaxation at a place that really should have been boring to her.
She considered the big gray Maine Coon. He was still leaning heavily into her leg, purring up a storm as she scratched around his head and chin, behind ears that were spiked at the tips. “What do you think, cat? You think I could come back and get this again? Little reprieve and relaxation? Little less restlessness?”
The purring increased. And with it, a drop in that staticky energy beneath her skin. Down to almost nothing.
Maybe she needed a cat to keep her system calmed.
Or maybe all this was magic.
“I think I’d like to come back,” she murmured. “See if anything new and different happens. Might be boring next time, but then again…maybe not.”
The purring continued, sounding a bit like a motor, and Iris chuckled. “Okay,” she said. “A second visit then.”
Maybe she’d finally found a place where she could feel settled. Even if only for a few hours. A good discovery.
She’d never been a regular anywhere before. Not even in her own life.
And being a regular somewhere sounded like it could be…interesting.
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Thanks for reading IRIS AT THE CAFE. I hope you enjoyed it!
You can get your own personal eBook copy of this story here. You can also peruse the previous Café stories that are individually available for sale here.
If you'd rather get a bunch of stories all in one collection, in paperback or ebook, check out the Stories from the Cafe Collections. VOLUME ONE and VOLUME TWO have all the 2025 stories. VOLUME THREE has the stories from the first half of 2026. And look out for VOLUME FOUR in early 2027!
Watch for the next Cafe story on December 1st!
IRIS AT THE CAFE Copyright © 2026 Kat Simons
All Rights Reserved. No part of this story may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This story is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously, and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.