The Third and Fourth Flutists

A gray beggar’s sky, a wee, wee sun pushed to one side glaring. ‘I will not take this lightly…nor sitting down’ said the legless man. ‘Well I suppose sitting down, but not lightly’. The lamplighter lit his last lamp and turned for home, a gay jaunt to his stride, his wick-lighter smoldering greyly. A Keizer band set up in front of the library, a cymbal-player, two percussionists, a tuba-player, three violinists, four flutists, one viola-ists, three trumpet players and seven trombonists. The second percussionist’s wife made mincemeat pies with crinkled edges and bird’s-feet tracks scored into the top crust. She sold them at the church bazaar every second Sunday and the week leading up to Lent.

The second percussionist made love to his pie-maker wife behind the Seder’s grocery across from the Waymart not far from the aqueduct where the water ran backwards and never on time. The third trumpet player liked to have sexual relations with birds, hens and pullets, water-fowl and prairie-grouse, Icelandic puffins and Labradorean sea-drakes with colourful tail feathers and twilled beaks. One of the flutists, a slight man with a tic, wore culottes with knee-socks and a red chemise with one button missing. He had sexual relations with himself, unlike the third and fourth flutists who had sexual relations with other flutists and a piccolo-player with a bum leg and a receding hairline.

The man in the hat heard the Keizer band play one afternoon just before Lent when he was out and about shopping for Easter eggs and a package of Wriggle’s Juicy-fruit chewing gum. He found the chewing gum, which he found at the Five & Dime across from the Seder’s grocery, but came up skint for the eggs. As Easter Day was quickly approaching, and with it the first anniversary of his acquaintance with the shamble leg man and the harridan’s sister, the man in the hat ran about willy-nilly in search of Ukrainian party-hats, bendable straws, place-settings and plum brandy.