27 Bushes

Burning, the bonsai smoked like a hand-rolled cigar, the ash falling onto his jacket like gray ceramic dust. The bonsai grew in abundance in front of his slag-hut; 27 bushes and 17 support sticks, 2 plants to a stick, 3 on the sturdiest. Astonished he eyeballed the sticks, the 18th bending tautly into the 19th; the 20th and 22nd leaning up against the rainspout. The Horsham hoisters and the West Sussex swingtops are in cahoots with the Siguatepequ Concertina Co. owned by the Comayagua Bros. Stumbling backward on capriped feet the fry-cook fell into the black thug of night, the skillet of his head bashed in right up to the warming handle. Stopping in front of Sweny’s Chemist he stared at himself in the tincture blue window, his nose a red splotch in the middle of a cabbage gray face. Having fled into the asylum of dreams the man in the hat prodded himself awake, his hat crumpled cockeyed on the floor next to his cot. ‘--one more dream like this I will surely go stark raving mad!’ he whispered, lest he awaken the entire sleeping world with his quibbling blub. ‘--tomorrow I will buy a hatbox with satin lining and a cinema-cord handle and place my best hat in it, then stepping out into the day cast the shadow of doubt on the head of the first man I see’. His dreams came and went like circling gulls on a sea-salty June day. Having forgotten how to forget he fell back into a state of mild stupor, his best hat swinging gaily at his side, stowed in roughed-out cardboard and tied in a butcher’s knot.