higgle & piggle, hither & yon

Written by Cathoel Jorss, published 12 years ago

Felt overcome by everything today & could not get out of my room until 4. So I went for a bike ride and found this basement cafe with a fireplace in the corner, right down the toe end of the sock on some higgledy-piggledy medieval street. O, comforting, o, deliciousness! But oh, no. Going up to pay I realized I had left my bank card lying on the desk at home. I could see it: scarlet, round-sided, shiny. The guy serving had made me the richest hot chocolate of my entire winter and didn’t look as though he wanted to call the police. We spread all my coins on the counter and sifted them. Australian cents with bandicoots on them, or are they bilbies? Or tiny wrinkled dugongs? A coin from the United Arab Emirates – on a long flight you pass through so many airports. There were three flattened rusted bottlecaps, valid in my own personal parallel universe, a shard of blue-painted china thrown out by the sea, and a badge which says Without Me You’re Just Aweso-

I turned over the docket and grabbed his pen. “Can you draw me a mudmap so I can find my way back here? These little tiny streets. I’m not used to them.” He did, with much head-scratching, and then we both looked at it: a long, wavering straight line with a dot on one end (the cafe) and a dot on the other (an intersection I would recognize). “This is a terrible map,” he said. I said, “It’s a great map. And it has your address on the back so I can ask someone. See you in two hours, max.” Probably his name is not Max but I daresay we understood each other.