It was 7:51 a.m. of a Sunday when he first crossed paths with Miss
Rhoda Bee. The parking lot of the grocery was rich with a spring
symphony of birds and circling cars, all made mazy and gracious in the
mellifluous light of an April morning, and he felt expansive and warm
for the first time in days. He would have coffee soon, and maybe even a
banana.
Beneath an old crape myrtle not yet in bloom, she stood
resolute, aflame in wrath, a five-foot colossus -- excluding her hair, a
sentry tower of twists and sharp outcroppings, itself vaguely
foreboding. she roundly, colorfully berated a father who had sat his
child in a buggy festively made to resemble a police car by way of
pieces of cardboard zip-tied to the sides.
"I'm just..." he began, waving one hand halfheartedly, but she cut him off, firing as might a Gatling.
"Just
getting young Junior acquainted with the dominance hierarchy whose
lineage he's been so lucky to have? Readying his unknowing hands for the
cold mercy of the department standard-issue? Or aren't you a police
officer yourself?"
The man shook his head, looking hopelessly toward
the grocery's cool, inviting entrance. Ah, reposeful heads of lettuce,
cheery tomatoes, quiet tubers. She grew truly incensed.
"Ah, a happy
turncoat, then! Familiarity breeding a rich complacency. Either gross
or a simpleton, you! Marring the tabula rasa with the hateful code of
men! Tainting the easy freedom of innocence with the noxious repression
that poisons the flower of life! And on the day you damned Saxons insist
the Lord himself favors!" She drew in a breath here and stopped
abruptly. He had drawn close to them, and stopped for a moment.
"The zip-ties even remind one of handcuffs," he offered reasonably.
Her glare went supernova. Her quarry had taken a vague resemblance to a turtle.
"Ah… but I'm a Unitarian?" the man ventured uncertainly. Apoplexy ensued.
"And all of this from a damned hippy-dippy bohemian bourgeois animist!" she spat. "Sacre merd de chevre! Fils de putin! Bonté!
You, sir, are a shameless protozoan, and I pray that whenever you go
seeking your quinoa, fair-trade certified organic Brazilian cocoa, and
kefir, you find only Cream of Wheat, Hershey's, and drinkable yogurt for
the lunchboxes of the youth condemned to follow in your sad footsteps."
The
child looked uncertain, but amused. The man nodded, then blinked, as if
astonished, and quickly wheeled the putative cop cart off, a refugee
seeking sanctuary among the produce. She followed him with her withering
stare.
He suddenly thought that he must also buy ginger ale. There
was a hand-basket on the ground beneath the myrtle's branch pointing
toward the entry. He nodded to her as he picked it up.
"Ma'am."
VII aprilis MMXIII scripta hoc plostro ante Rousem viso
