Crab Crust So That Hard Knots Stay Integrated
The
tabletop was dusted with Donnie’s skin spores, tiny black granules that, if
properly moistened with a mixture of liquid manure and orange juice, could
mature into tiny clones of Donnie.
Masterton, head of security for Nobbling Intertesticular Bruncheon,
swept the little black dots into his outstretched, upturned hat, careful not to
drool as he did so. He shook his hat a
couple of times, watching the accumulated effluvia inside jump about like the
intolerable hopes of a college drop-out.
“Have
you seen Donnie?” Rita, putting her head
in the door, asked.
“No,”
Masterton answered without taking his eyes off the dancing possibilities. “But he’s been here. He left his crumbs.” He showed Rita the interior of his
high-crowned hat.
Rita
frowned in disgust, but said nothing.
Her makeup, although applied with a mason’s eye for adhesion and
structural soundness, did nothing to cover up the acne scars that were her war
medals from high school. In the intervening
years she had seen Nobbling grow into a commercial empire threatening even the
moon’s mercantilist maunderings. Her
father had directed the firm’s reformation division. She now drove an expensive car of a make
supposedly no longer in production, one whose continued existence was kept a
luxurious, exclusive secret from the pill-shaky and short-of-breath rabble.
“Why
are they short of breath?” Stevenson asked.
She was fresh from administering IQ tests to all of the cousins and
nearly allowed herself to flop into the booth.
“Because…” I considered. “Because when one thinks of the days gone by,
the opportunities lost, the irretrievable
past, one tends to gasp for breath.”
I looked at the erstwhile schoolteacher.
“Haven’t you found that to be the case?”
“No,
actually, I haven’t. Jesus sustains me
through moments of distress. However,”
She wriggled her bony rump into a more comfortable position. “Aren’t such moments equally the preserve of
the rich as well as the… for lack of a better term, poor?”
“No,”
I insisted, leaning forward with my hands on the edge of the table preparatory
to pushing off into space, “Because they have Jesus to sustain them, should
their money prove insufficient.” I spit
the words at the old horse-faced mocker, something I really shouldn’t have
done, for later, on the planet of free goats, ugly little Donnies sprung from
my hands like Downs Syndrome victims studying for the ministry.
