Every day, the Perk Me Up coffee shop is shrouded in a veil of mystery. Even the keenest minds have no answer to this inscrutable puzzle: Where does this café get the six pastries it has for sale every morning?
Six pastries—no more, no less. Who is it that chooses them? By what arcane method are they procured?
The first customer through Perk Me Up’s door each morning is usually greeted by two croissants, a blueberry muffin, an orange-hibiscus scone, a cheese danish, and a dense brown orb that goes by the alias of “5-seed beignet.” But by 9 a.m. at the latest this scant hoard of pasties is gone, sold off and vanished like the fallen empire of Ozymandias. The only traces of the pastries that remain are a few errant crumbs on a slab of black granite countertop, monuments to the impermanence of Perk Me Up’s highly limited supply of baked goods.
The mystery only deepens when you consider that many unlucky customers arrive each day hoping to purchase a pastry, only to leave with a latte and nothing more. If this coffee shop of secrets had more pastries for sale, it would earn more money, yet its enigmatic owners choose not to sell more than six! What could have driven them to present this meager tableau of baked goods each day? It is a maddening riddle that seems to be without answer.
Great thinkers have long pondered the origin of these cryptic pastries, speculating as to whether a barista carefully crafts them one by one, or whether some mysterious manager buys them in small quantities from a local bakery. But these are no more than wild theories, thrown out in a desperate search for understanding.
No solution to this mystery may ever be forthcoming, leaving humanity forever wandering in the dark—ignorant of the source of the six pastries. We can only hope to arrive early enough to buy a sweet treat, in the primeval hours of dawn, before the last pastry is sold and additional customers are doomed to lament their hunger without any rhyme or reason for their suffering.
