Mahjongg and Gin

On Saturdays the man in the hat liked to eat poppyseed cake with sugar-icing. He sopped it in bone-malt taking small uneven nibbles. His grandmamma made bunt-cakes in an oblong pan with crinkled edges (the edges were like italics but crinklier). His granddad divvied up the cake with the scythe he used to cutback the colic-grass that grew at the back of the yard. (His granddad told him that once he went to an elf-food store to buy wheat-germ and came home with three small bags of birdseed and a child’s shoehorn). On Sundays the man in the hat liked to eat ceriman (Araceae Monstera deliciosa Liebm. syn. Philodendron pertusum; ananas japonez, Japanese pineapple) apples. He bought them from the Seder’s grocers with the coppers he saved from his paper-route.

‘The sky is falling’ said the alms man to the shamble leg man. ‘Soon it will disappear altogether, kaput’. ‘That’s odd indeed’ said the shamble leg man, ‘very odd indeed’. ‘Yes indeed, very odd indeed’ said the alms man in a low whispering voice. ‘Why, might I ask, should we care whether the sky falls, goes kaput altogether, really, why indeed?’ said the shamble leg man. ‘I suppose on account of the fact, the fact that it’s what keeps the stars from falling into our heads, crashing into the tops of our heads, your head and mine, both our heads’. ‘I suppose’ said the shamble leg man ‘I suppose the moon, too, keeps the moon, too, from falling into the tops of our heads, your’s and mine, both our heads’. (A coalman’s dark sky hung like an afterthought in the late evening sky; two skies, a binary of skies). ‘Kurt Gödel said the sky is never the same twice’ said the alms man scientifically. ‘He said it has to do with the geometry of the sky, the algebraic positioning of the sky’. ‘Yes, the night sky, especially’ said the shamble leg man astronomically.

The harridan buttoned the top-button of her blouse and smiled, a ticking of white-ivory-white teeth catching beams of moonlight. Her sister, on those days when she wasn’t making knickknacks and trinkets, sewed colourful buttons onto a sash she wore on Thursday evenings, the night she played pinochle with the other trinket-makers. They shared a bottle of Gin with soda and wedges of lime, passing the opened bottle round in a circle, each trinket-maker taking a swig then passing it on to the next until the bottle was emptied and dry. They gibbered and wailed in italics and Esperanto, interrupting each other without the slightest regard for politeness and good manners. They played pinochle with Mahjongg tiles and three-sided dice, using the Gin cap as a dye-shaker.