Each tooth was carved with a different character. Florcus didn't recognize the language.
'Wonderful', he murmured. 'Is that driftwood, bleached by the sun?'

'It is.', said the man. He leaned back in his chair and opened the window behind him. The wind blew out the curtain, rain drove them back and he closed it again.

'I went with Love down to the distant Sea
And there Love said to me
'Close your eyes and taste my sweet salt tears
That glisten, they were shed for ye.'
I opened my eyes and the sky was grey and the sea Black
I was up to my chest in the black sea. The foam was around my chest
My skin screamed with the cold but I could not feel it.
Crabs scuttled up the shore and gulls wheeled overhead
Hundreds of years passed and I saw my feet grow white, mottled and skeletal.
I washed up on the beach and rolled my eyes in their empty sockets.
Small children played with my phalanges and used them for sport.
The sun bleached my bones and they grew pitted and brittle.
On the last day, I felt a warmth I had not felt in years
I compelled myself to turn my head; Love was standing there
His neoclassical profile silhouetted against the flaming sun.
'It is Time', said he and pointed upwards. The skies were streaming out
And Angels filled every corner of the aerial aspect.
I turned back to Love and he beckoned to me. 'You must Ride forth.'
At once I knew what I must do. A pale horse stood, steaming and wild.
My knee bent and creaked. Sand fell to the ground
As I stood up, taller than I had been in life.
The horse quivered and flecks in his grey eyes steeled me
Against what was to come.
The music of the angels above soared and trembled, fell and rose.
I tightened the reins in, the leather strained agains his fury
I ran my brittle hand along the steel blade left for my purpose,
released the reins and let him go.'

A strange glow appeared in his eyes. 'It was foretold that my first stop would be to meet a Mr. Florcus. Would that be you, good sir?'

The Bones

"What fine teeth!" said florcus, "are they actually carved?" The strangers face shifted into a smile, large and revealing the extent of his collection. "My gallery." he said with genuine pride. All three men leaned forward for a closer look.

"I am your past, your future, your dreams. i fit in between the people you see on the street, filling those alone moments that fly past your sub-conscience. i was your mother's lover when she was a teenager, i taught your father how to fight, i called your cats and dogs when you slept. i can give you freedom from your future, opening it's doors to a multitude of feelings. i will bear your kidney stones, they will pass from me in my pain, covering me in a sickening electric energy. i am the veteran who smoked your crack, lived on your pain medication until the VA clinic took them away in a puff of weed. i am the old man who's wife died in her 30's from a brain aneurysm, wracked with fear of a brain tumor, sitting up nights. i looked into your eyes late at night in the appliance section at Meijer's, we didn't speak, but you were carrying a basket filled with borsch, and tooth picks." At this point his grip on Florcus increased, the pain becoming visible in his eyes. The stranger leaned in closer to Florcus' face, almost nose to nose. "Who eats borsch in this day and age?" he said through his carved teeth.

w

He leaned back in his chair and Guiseppe and Florcus could do nothing but gape at him. His skin blended in inexorably with the beige flowers of the cafe wallpaper. A row of baroque teeth beamed back at them.
Information download 79% complete....

'Want some coffee?' he said suddenly, lurching forward and tossed a bag of what seemed to be frozen gravy onto the table. 'I brought it for sustainment on my journey.'

Florcus picked up the bag. It seeped gently from the corner onto the tablecloth. Florcus noticed a pattern appearing and moved the bag so that the pattern would be symmetrical.
'What's the matter with you? Cat got your tongue, sir? There is no generally agreed origin among etymologists for this bizarre expression, ha ha, although there does seem to be a broad view that the expression came into popular use in the 1800s, and first appeared in print in 1911!'

He took a breath.
'In my view the most logical explanation is that it relates to the 'cat-o-nine-tails' whip used in olden days maritime punishments, in which it is easy to imagine that the victim would be rendered incapable of speech or insolence. A less likely, but no less dramatic suggested origin, is that it comes from the supposed ancient traditional middle-eastern practice of removing the tongues of liars and feeding them to cats.'

The cafe door opened with a horrifying ting-a-ling, letting in a gust of wind which made the students dash around grabbing at pages with graphs on them. A lanky, curly-haired lad took advantage of the distraction to finish off the meatballs for the group.
The overall effect was that the stage was set for the entry of our new character. The hand that reached out obnoxiously into florcus's face, shiny, pink and overeager, belonged to....

Down the corridors where the hours are suns.

I am visited nightly by the seven muses, who sit around my boudoir and quote to me directly from God. When I arise, my mind is instantly flooded with an impulse to create and with it, beautiful, heroic epic stories which need to be told for the benefit of mankind through the medium of coffee.


My soul is innervated with the song of the ages and it is my destiny to impart my insights to the grovelling, flea-ridden masses of 'humanity' that dwell outside my door, waiting night and day to glimpse my greatness.


I often watch the people as they pass in their soulless droves below my turret window. They scurry about on the cobblestones in their badly repaired burlap sack 'clothing'. Their grasping hands and blank minds just calls for my edification. It is my duty to give it to them.

I start by kneeling in front of a stained glass window of Engelbert Humperdinck and calling before me the winged sprites who guide my hand to turn shadow into form; to bring being out from nothingness; then I pick up my pencil and turn to my room-sized easel that I had shipped out from Paris last week. I then take out the pile of coffee beans of all various hues to the canvas which I had made by five small Indian children in the village of Boratje for mere pennies. The rest is a vague void, for creation is a mystery and I am often caught up in the ecstasy and do not remember a thing.

The room is filled with God-rays, lighting both myself and the canvas every time I put down a stroke. It is by this sign that I know I am going down the right path and fulfiling the aforementioned destiny. I know the painting is finished when the heavens open, releasing brilliant light, heavenly music and trumpeting angels; the beauty so inspires them that they sometimes fly away back up to Heaven carrying my painting with them!'

He laughed and took a deep breath. He started rolling a cigarette, using his thumb to tuck the leafy material inside the paper. A new programme began on the tv in the cafe.

'When I have my coffee paintings displayed in Notre-Dame and the Louvre, in the National Galleries in Delft, Florence and Rome, in the New World and beyond, I want to hear stories from intrepid travellers as they spent their life's savings travelling by coffin ships from all four corners of the world to finally arrive in front of my paintings. I want to hear then how they fell before my masterpiece, sobbing and with their souls filled with self-loathing and a redemptive grace all at once. I want this to be a transformative process for my audience. I want them to go away knowing their lives will never be quite the same again, then to spread the word until I am known throughout the dark forests and the high-peaked mountain ranges, through the seven ages of rainland and the bleak shadowlands- then can I truly call my work done and I shall be transported to where I truly belong amongst the greats of the ages and I shall sit on the crowned throne as the Highest of All Artistés. Yes! Ha!'

Liberty and Coffee for All

i suffer from a recurring dream afflicting my sleep at least twice weekly. i have been relocated from an earth "no longer suitable to my type" to a colony called Liberty on a green planet a few solar systems over. i work in some sort of city office where everyone accepts all this as normal, of course.

The major employer in the colony, besides the government, is Allemand Industries Inc. - new, rebuilt or remanufactured, we can help you make the right choice - specializing in the sales and services of diesel engines and accessories for the marine, industrial, oilfield and fishing industries. Allemand Industries can complete what others have problems finishing, if you know what i mean. out the back door, naturally, they run a side interest in the liquidation of political undesirables get shipped in real regular from earth. this being one of the main functions of Liberty.

in the city office, i am treated like a moron. given tedious drone-like tasks, and monitored constantly, with talk about my "future with the organization" etc. everyone acts like their lives are full of purpose and direction toward some grand end, which, insofar as i am able to witness, appears nothing more than a grand delusional fantasy. by the same token i feel i am forced to live in the same way. all i have to do to be allowed to continue is to smile and say i like it.

the most horrible thing about Liberty is that there is an endless supply of free coffee, but the coffee maker hasn't been cleaned properly in years and in consequence the coffee is absolutely nasty in flavor. all the nasty coffee you can drink. welcome to Liberty.

cut to the Bureau of Agricultural Logistics. i am just finished with a 300 page report on the feasability of sustainable oatmeal and plop it on the formica desktop of Agent Cornporn, 27th district manager for distribution of hoof jelly. he puts down his paper, glances at the report and looks at me like i just rolled a turd into his ambrosia salad.

He closed the laptop and thought about what he'd just read. His little brother was a paean to modern life, roving the world with no ties or restrictions. Sometimes, Harold wished that he, too, had such a life but he enjoyed stability too much.
Harold checked the time on the wall. He needed to meet the small bald man in the cafe in fifteen minutes and he decided to stroll down by the river. The city rose above him as he took the elevator down (it only went down, for some odd reason, and no one had ever figured out how it got to the top again). Florcus stopped a passersby and pointed to the word 'піна' written on a napkin. The man he had stopped pointed up the hill (a very large hill), on the top of which stood a tall, rickety building bearing піна in large golden letters. Harold thanked the man and began the vertical trek. The small trees on either side of the road changed from decidiuous to coniferous in a matter of minutes and Harold began to experience dizziness associated with vertigo. Finally he got inside and ordered some fortifying soup and coffee.
The bald man Florcus was meeting was called Guiseppe and was an italian expat in the Ukraine. He had been in the country since his hair was down to his shoulders. He was married to a french woman called Marie who had cut her hair in close curls in sympathy to her husband. He worked as a palaentologist and was supervising a dig near the city boundaries. He was picking at a plate of chicken bones covered in borscht while absent mindedly listening to a TV shouting out sport commentaries in ukrainian. As he saw the breathless Florcus through the lace curtains, he waved and waited.
'What does піна mean?', asked Florcus as he sat down, his face red from the exertion.
'It means scum', said Guisseppe, scraping another bone.
'Isn't that a bit odd?' asked Florcus. He didn't understand ukrainian humour. 'Of course', said Guisseppe, 'It is intended that the irony would be seen...' but he shrugged. 'At least it's not as odd as the Allemanni bar down the hill.
'What does Allemanni mean?' asked Florcus, starting to revive.
'The owner believes himself to be descended from Attila the Hun', Guiseep replied, chuckling at the idea. 'I think the name comes from the region that Attila is from.'
At that moment, a man behind Guiseppe turned around exasperatedly and thickly replied 'No! No! It comes from the name of a Suebic tribe or confederation that settled in Alsace and part of Switzerland (and source of the Fr. Allemand "German"), from *Alamanniz, probably meaning "all-man" and denoting a wide alliance of tribes, but perhaps meaning "foreign men" (for example, referring to Allobroges, name of a Celtic tribe in what is now Savoy, in L. lit. "the aliens," in reference to their having driven out the original inhabitants), in which case the al- is cognate with the first element in L. alius "the other" and the english 'Else'."
He paused for breath.
'Who asked you?' said Guiseppe, visibly annoyed at the obvious eavesdropping.
'I'm an etymologist' replied the newcomer and moved his chair over to join their table.
'Isn't that bugs?' asked Florcus. They both looked at him.
'That's etomology' said the stranger at last and smiled out of the corner of his mouth. 'I get that a lot.'
'Meh.' repled florcus and returned to his soup which was starting to congeal at the edges. He mopped it up with a chunk of bread. The other two returned to arguing intensely about whether or not it was appropriate to correct a mistake made in a private conversation. Florcus looked around the cafe. The menu included several varieties of ukrainian spam and the wallpaper was made out of that curious material which seems to almost be fabric, but too shiny. The sports had turned into a wildlife documentary on otters. Students entered the cafe and started copying homework off each other at a table in the corner. The owner came over and flicked at them with his towel, shouting at them to pay or clear off. They all chipped in together to get a plate of meatballs, knowing that it would take about half an hour for them to be ready and in that time they would be nearly finished. The owner left looking slightly happier.
Guiseppe turned to Florcus. 'Francis here says he can help us with your work. Tell him what you think, Francis.'
Francis thumbed the buttons on his coat and hemmed and hawed and showed a toothy smile. He obviously liked being the centre of attention and made the most of it. He cleared this throat theatrically, causing some of the students to look over. This further increased the effect of his being on the stage.
He began '.....