Althing Medal of Achievement

This is how it was told to me (by a person without a face, an apparition) so I’m sworn to tell it how it is. He arrived on the back of a wood-splintered oxcart drawn by three snorting oxen screaming, not a word that came out of his mouth heard by another. Tied in sackcloth, the burlap biting into his soft yellow flesh he yelled ‘--Mlaga Andalucia, God have mercy on my shapeless soul’. The man in the hat first met him under the Waymart clock on a Thursday afternoon, the sun barely risen above the second-hand, the sky threatening rain. His father laid the stones for the Lögberg, a granite seat that sits two meters shy of the Lögsögumaður’s House, around which lays a circular pond approximately 135 feet in diameter surrounded by a ring of 24 planted trees. His father, who never once took the Lord’s name in vain or double-crossed a mountebank, was awarded the Althing Medal of Achievement for not once dropping a cinder-block or spilling mortar on the Priester’s awning. The Rathgar Infirmary, run by Aloysius and Mrs. Eileen Rathgar, sell strawberry tarts, 5 for a dollar a half-dozen for 4. Thursdays they substitute rhubarb for strawberry, the tarts going for a nickel a piece.