The Bipolar Cafe

By Tim Frank

The restaurant was called The Bipolar Cafe and at the grand opening there were long queues of strange, fidgety loners, wearing odd Rick and Morty socks, craving some carbs and maybe a platter of deep-fried Mars bars smothered with cheese.

Inside, the mood was inconsistent—some were gloomily inspecting their bloody hangnails, while others stood on chairs singing Rockstar by Nickleback, like hairy Viking warriors.

At 7pm a voice on the loudspeaker announced, “The entrées will now be served, please be seated and stop licking the windows.”

Some denounced the cafe on their blogs, then immediately gave the restaurant five stars on tripadvisor. One customer hung a Learner driver sign around his neck, but no one knew why.

The waiters took several deep breaths, prayed to a god they didn’t like, then fanned out into the dining room. They set the dishes down and dashed back to the kitchen for safety. The patients—I mean the clientele—inspected their food. But it wasn’t food, it was 1000mg of lithium garnished with sprigs of parsley and some pickled ginger.

The patrons nudged the parsley around their plates with suspicion, until each of them gave in to temptation and swallowed their waxy, yellow pills—maybe they were peanut M&Ms or refreshing breath mints.

Soon enough, a calm as soft as a boggy meadow, spread through the restaurant. The patrons began to drool on their knees, and then fell into a deep slumber.

The waiters took the chance to collect the dirty plates and tiptoed into the dining hall. But one of them nudged a patron with a flailing serviette and the customer jolted into life, exploding into a frenzied tantrum. Everyone else opened their eyes, wrestled themselves free from their dreamy stupors, blinked like furious pigeons, then stomped their feet on the floor.

Before the waiters could serve the main course of Olanzapine, everyone set fire to their napkins and lobbed them onto a pyre built from broken tables and chairs.

The customers burst out of the restaurant into the street, smashed the front window with wine bottles, looted a nearby cinema foyer for buttered popcorn and roughed up some drunken clubbers outside McDonald’s.

They laughed and cried, but not necessarily in that order. The Bipolar Cafe closed its doors to the general public that night. It never reopened.

Tim Frank’s short stories have been published in Bending Genres, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, Maudlin House, Rejection Letters and elsewhere. He was runner-up in The Forge Literary Flash Fiction competition. He has been nominated for Best Small Fictions.