Dim Bastard

Lela ran fast, faster than lightening on a clear day. She stopped at the Seder grocer’s to buy a bar of soap, the grocer giving her a tinker’s stare, then headed the logway up the street, her skirt billowing in the noontime breeze. The legless man sat in his druthers beside the Waymart playing pick up sticks with the alms man, the sun cooping the awning. The legless man gave eye to Lela, who scurrying past bumped into his pushcart sending it caroming into the street. ‘…thoughtless cow…’ he hollered, his neck reddening. ‘…watch where your going…’. Lela hurried past, her feet making haste with the hot asphalt. She stopped in front of the aqueduct, took a deep breath and whispered ‘…dim bastard…’. Lela waked westward under a gray pitch of clouds, the bar of soap wrapped in the arm of her sweater. The next morning the man in the hat sat under the sky reading the funny pages. He read comics about fat people and skinny people and people who were almost fat and almost skinny. He read funny stories about funny people with funny families and funny pets. He read comics that’d been in the funny pages long before he was born, and some older than old itself. There was a comic about a fat man with a skinny family, and one about a skinny man with a fat family. On the back page of the funny pages was an advertisement for a cream that promised to tame wavy hair and cure cowlicks. He sat under the sky and read until his eyes stung and his fingers ached, then pulling his hat over his brow fell asleep under a blanket of funny pages and blue sky.