A Cruel Devilish Sky

This was not the first time the sky had fallen into the shamble leg man’s house; twice before it had plummeted through his roof, humiliating the bones and chinks in his neck. The first time after a trip to Jelgavas in search of raw monks’ cheese, the second time the night after the day he spent the night sleeping under the stars in the woodlot behind the Waymart. Each time he awoke with a stitch in his neck, a hole as round as a lamb’s belly in his roof. Such was the misfortune of living under a cruel devilish sky. He kept a copy of the Guttenberg Bible under his bed next to his Popular Mechanics collection. That morning, the third time he awoke to a lamb’s belly hole in his roof, he reached under the bed for the Guttenberg, and thumbing through it came to the proverb for those in woe, 'He that tilleth his land shall have plenty of bread: but he that followeth after vain persons shall have poverty enough'. Wiping his brow he thought, ‘…fallow land is tilled by snorting oxen, seeded with rocks and pebbles…’. He left home with a hankering in his belly for lamb stew with baby carrots and bulb garlic.

Bill Bailey lived not far from the stickmaker’s shop in the outskirts of town, (any town). The stickmaker whittled piano legs and broken crutches into walking-sticks, the alms-stick being fashionable among the unfortunate and ambulatory. He (the stickmaker) liked cob soup with cornbread and pureed squash, chewing a mouthful of cob with a spoonful of mashed squash. He lived quietly in a ramshackle hut at the outskirts of town with a dog and a cat. The dog spoke in tongues, the cat in pantomime. His shop was made from porch wood, held together with straightened nails and copper wire. Bill Bailey stopped by to chew the fat with the dog, with whom he had a fond social relationship. The cat, of whom he was not fond, he kept at a distance, lest the beastly viper scratch out his eye or spit up toad or a church mouse.