The man in the hat stopped to chat with László Bíró, offering him a honey roll and a cup of creamery buttermilk. As László Bíró was stone deaf he preferred that people write things on a slate, which he carried with him toggled to his belt loop. In his left coat pocket, where he kept Band-Aids and old scraps of paper with numbers written on them, some so old (23478910) he’d forgotten the reason they were given to him, he had at his disposal three pieces of chalk, red, blue and yellow, the prime colours. If and when someone wished to speak with him, people and occasions being limited, he would reach into his coat pocket, choose a prime colour (he knew each colour by bevels cut into the chalk: one for red, two for blue and three for yellow) and pointing to his slate grunt: one grunt for each colour. In the small town of Drohobycz where László Bíró was born, to a sow-fat mother and a whiskey-tempered father, he grew to be an accomplished lip-reader; his skill at making sense of the pointless in high demand among the townsfolk.
Lorca Murcia Maribor Brezovica sat with his hands clasped on his lap thinking of ways to count to one-thousand-and-one backwards without missing a vowel or a consonant, believing that if could he’d be freed from ever having to count again, something, counting, he wished he’d never become acquainted with or allowed to do. Years of calculations, algebraic tabulations and vectoring had taken their toll on him; and as he was nearing the second half of his life he felt it was time to disabuse himself of old habits, counting everything he came in contact with being at the top of his list. He heard there was a savant who lived in a clapboard shack beyond the five-mile fence; a man with such powers of abstract concentration (he’d been raised on arithmetic tables and fractions held together in a coil-bound orange scribbler) that anyone who came within four miles of him was immediately overcome with a feeling of lightheadedness. After last year’s Feast of the Awful Sinners, put on every year by the Church of the Perpetual Sinner, he met the man in the hat, the alms man, the legless man, the harridan and her sister, Dejesus and the Witness, all seven enjoying a laugh over Chaucer’s rum and three-bean soup in the carousel shed behind the Waymart.
Lorca Murcia Maribor Brezovica sat with his hands clasped on his lap thinking of ways to count to one-thousand-and-one backwards without missing a vowel or a consonant, believing that if could he’d be freed from ever having to count again, something, counting, he wished he’d never become acquainted with or allowed to do. Years of calculations, algebraic tabulations and vectoring had taken their toll on him; and as he was nearing the second half of his life he felt it was time to disabuse himself of old habits, counting everything he came in contact with being at the top of his list. He heard there was a savant who lived in a clapboard shack beyond the five-mile fence; a man with such powers of abstract concentration (he’d been raised on arithmetic tables and fractions held together in a coil-bound orange scribbler) that anyone who came within four miles of him was immediately overcome with a feeling of lightheadedness. After last year’s Feast of the Awful Sinners, put on every year by the Church of the Perpetual Sinner, he met the man in the hat, the alms man, the legless man, the harridan and her sister, Dejesus and the Witness, all seven enjoying a laugh over Chaucer’s rum and three-bean soup in the carousel shed behind the Waymart.
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