Blorange by Abigail Jervis

It was a stormy summer afternoon, the kind of day when the sweet sea air is scattered across the sky by the storm surge crashing into the sea walls. Heavy rains came battering their way down from the heavens just before the oppressive summer sun peeked its head up through the clouds, cranking up the humidity past the point where humans can no longer survive. On this day, I sought the refuge of my local cafe, Uncle Russ, to get some writing done. While established in the 1990s, Uncle Russ never quite left that decade. The interior is plastered with dark, woody tones and soft felt armchairs. Wrought iron desk lamps stand posted upon each little table, providing just enough light for the cafe to almost feel like a fancy restaurant if it weren't for the glass wall saturating the ambience with the passing stormy skies. 

The smell, while initially a faint twinge in the air, had gradually begun to swelter and bubble as it grew in the air around me, glutting every last nook and cranny with its presence.

That day was a slow day; the cafe sat quiet, only to have the relative silence broken by the occasional hiss of the espresso machine and the murmuring conversations between the baristas and the regulars. I sat in the corner, facing the collection of chairs hauled in from the patio just before the storm hit, and as I stared blankly at my computer, a familiar smell started to trace its way up through my nose. The smell, while initially a faint twinge in the air, had gradually begun to swelter and bubble as it grew in the air around me, glutting every last nook and cranny with its presence. It slowly encroached down my nose and into my lungs like a rising tide, slowly lapping its way up the shoreline, until all of the air that once called my lungs home had been forcibly displaced by this new intruder. All the while, my mind was sitting there sparking – flickering through people and places, trying to track this scent down. 

As the smell permeated my very existence, the cafe around me faded into the background as my mind started to waltz through the flickering memories. We danced our way through raunchy bar bathrooms and stunning floral gardens. Through the bustling lunch-rushed dim sum restaurants infested with steam baskets and through the damp alleyways mired by dripping air conditioners. Then, we tapped our way onto the old star ferries, where sea spray and diesel fumes fogged your mind, and off into the ocean of tourists yelling in a thousand different tongues. Finally, we foxtrotted our way into the home of a childhood friend, situated atop a peninsula that overlooked the rippling bay below. Here, my mind had left me looking down at my childhood self.

In his hands, he held two glasses of "Blorange", a melange of different fruit concentrates that he'd pioneered.

There I was, with a stupid haircut and no sense of style, and my friend, with an equally stupid haircut and wearing a Star Wars t-shirt. His dad, a heavy-set British man with an eternal hankering for beer and 70s movies, stumbled his way out of the kitchen. He brushed past the year-round mistletoe hanging from the kitchen doorway, down the hall decorated by: a plethora of posters to films I now recognize as classics, a scaled down solar system showing all planets and notable moons - with those glow-in-the-dark stars stuck on in the gaps between it all, and lastly with a whole Tardis that had inexplicably found its way into their home like a once-stray dog. In his hands, he held two glasses of "Blorange", a melange of different fruit concentrates that he'd pioneered, presumably to satiate his children's ever-expanding need for sweets during elevenses. Then, in a less-than-graceful motion, he placed the glasses in front of my friend and me. With smiles plastered to our faces, we began to drink this wonderful concoction.

Unfortunately, I never did get the recipe for the Blorange. However, I can guarantee that it must contain black currants, for when my mind had cleared and I returned to the cafe, I saw that one of the baristas had made a sort of lemonade with black currant concentrate.