My chin was itching, so I knew I was going to have visitors. I sat out on my patio eating an Otter Pop and a scary clown came down the alleyway to stand in front of me. He had sharp pointy teeth and his yellow gloves were stained red.
"Boo!" he growled at me.
"Oh, go to blazes" I shot back, too irritated to take his threatening demeanor seriously. The Elders had just called to cancel their lunch with me, and I already had the red sauce simmering on the stove. NOW what was I going to do with it? Thus, my cranky mood.
"Would you like to buy a balloon?" the scary clown asked hopefully.
"No" I replied shortly. "Beat it. Get lost. Am-scray." The scary clown trudged away -- a broken metaphor of something or other that I was too peeved to ponder.
Now came a guy in a dark blue v-neck sweater. "Can I buy your sunflowers please?" he asked in an accent like El Brendel.
"Where you from?" I asked him, my temper not improved by his fakey sounding accent. The cosmos was playing practical jokes on me and I wasn't enjoying it.
"Greenland" he said apologetically. "I come to buy up tings here so you don't buy up my country first."
"That's ridiculous" I shot back. "Nobody in their right mind would want to buy your country -- it's nothin' but rocks and ice and a bunch of sheep."
"Maybe so" he said sheepishly, "but I vill buy you first before you buy me."
"Begone, you piece of lousewort!" I yelled at him, going out of my mind with grief at the senseless and continual selling and buying that seemed to engulf my surroundings. The poor Greenlander broke down and started to cry at my outburst, so I offered him a chair and a Pancho Punch Otter Pop.
"There, there" I said kindly. "Let us not speak of vulgar commercial matters any more. Speak to me of crowberries and rhubarb instead."
We became best friends that day, and I invited him to move in with me. Now we go on long hikes and make reindeer sausage together. And when his native land sunk into the ocean after all the glaciers were deported, I bought him a nice pair of penny loafers to console him.
