Reading Ulysses in Montana #309
An exhibition of clowns littered the doorway of Kerstin’s flower shop, each clown with a bouquet pinned to her lapel, a bouquet that could squirt water with a squeeze of a bulb in a pocket.
Kerstin shooed the clowns from her borne but they resisted cruciferously. “I’m all out of broccoli,” she said. They resisted metallurgically. “I’m all out of stainless steel,” she said. They resisted obstreperously. “I don’t know what that means,” she said. A light lit up her flower shop–Malmö’s finest–and the clowns resisted luminously. “That’s the cleaning gent,” she said. “He ain’t helping you one bit.”
The exhibition of clowns piled higher against her door, blocking Kerstin’s entrance. She looked up at the window to the apartment above the shop and thought about the chicken in the oven. Roasting. Roasting in the pan, drenched with butter and broth. Kerstin brushed more butter on the bird, shut the oven door, and looked at the full moon outside her apartment window.
The full moon doused her with a stream of water from the bouquet on its lapel with a squeeze of a bulb in its pocket. Then it smiled and said, “What have I become, my Swedish friend?” Kerstin said, “Go away.” And it did, but it took the roasted, buttered chicken with it all the way to the dark side where no eclipse could save it from the heart of the sun.
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The little dog laughed
To see such sport,
~
As did I.
Great fun.
Looniferous hungerianage.
Not everyone goes away, in the end.
The cold, solar furnace incinerated the fowl instantly, rendering the buttered skin into atomic ash, yet leaving behind a localized aroma of thyme that drifted across the vacuum of space. Down in Malmö, Kerstin stood by her window, her thumbs tucked stoically into the pockets of her apron, staring at the empty sky where the thieving satellite had just been.The Lunar Repercussions“Typical,” she muttered to the glass, her tone purely meteorological.She turned back to the kitchen, her thoughts navigating the sudden void of her dinner with the heavy, rhythmic plodding of a displaced dockworker. The oven door remained open, a dark, gaping mouth of unfulfilled gastronomy, breathing out a dying hiss of gas.