Magpie Pie

A magpie flew flocking across this crisscross crossly, its tiny misshapen beak wormy with tads and cableways. The hawker, who by this time had opened his wares-table, threw a handful of hooey at the magpie, missing it by a Poe’s wing. A raven black sky, a rare consign in such a havenless place, blew back the handful of hawker’s hooey, the hawker ducking behind his wares-table like a fearful muck. Cacaw cacaw went the magpie impiously, its eyes black with desecration. Wormy worms and cawing caw cawing were too much for the man in the hat, so he turned easterly and made quick. His grandmamma made magpie pie, crimping the edges with a fork, beaks and magpie feet crabbing, his grandmamma tamping them back down with the upside of her wooden spoon. He remembered his grandmamma’s feebleness, and the way she cowered when the rain fell in rainy sheets, the curtains in the kitchen window pillowing, her eyes scorned with yesterday’s bad news and tomorrow’s worries. ‘You will eat this pie, young man, or else..!’ Her mouth curled up at the edges when she scolded him, trench-lines furrowing the trebled skin above her lip. His grandmamma smoked 27½ Chesterfield’s a day, snubbing out the smoldering filter in an empty Chockfull-O-Nuts coffee tin with her thumb. As far back as he could remember, which was far indeed, his grandmamma had a smudge on her cheek, a blemish left behind from the smoldering filter of a spent Chesterfield. When he was old enough to take up smoking (that day coming on his tenth birthday surrounded by unlikable relatives and a dope sick clown with fish breath) he smoked stinky French cigarettes that came in a blue box with a winged helmet on the front.