Chapter Nineteen
The mosquitoes were out in force because of the humid weather, but the guests in their fancy evening-wear weren’t affected. They crowded close to Derrick in the gazebo and he soaked up all the bugs. A pile of dead swatted mosquitoes lay on the floor around him.
The caterers wore black pants and white shirts. Ben thought this uniform was meant to dehumanize them, so the guests wouldn’t feel uncomfortable with fellow human-beings subservient to them. The caterers strode across the grass between the kitchen and the gazebo, carrying silver trays of hors d’oeuvres: hunks of rare roast beef on rice cakes, stuffed mushrooms, squares of cheese on toothpicks, caviar on small squares of toast. When Derrick reached for a stuffed mushroom, the caterer jerked the tray away. Apparently the food was only for the guests, not the employees
***
After throwing his ice cubes in Ben’s face and deciding that Ben “wasn’t worth it,” Howard Roseman stormed off to the bar to get himself another drink. On the way, he snatched a platter of appetizers from a passing caterer and wolfed them down greedily.
Ben didn’t feel too upset from the throwing of the ice in his face. He was too inspired to feel humiliation or any other emotion. The inspiration flushed out every other feeling and filled him with tingles. He whipped out his notebook, his blue Bic plastic pen, (it was a workingman’s pen; medium point, not bourgeois fine point,) and composed The Particle of Love, comparing the intangibility of True Love to the mysterious Higgs Boson.
At first, Ben thought his poem was great, but then he realized he was feeling a false inspiration. His poem had nothing about the workingman, it rhymed, and his father would like it. He had sold out.
Ben looked up at the gazebo and saw the crowd laughing merrily, impervious to Derrick’s misery as insects devoured him. No one even offered to bring him a fly swatter. They snatched food and drinks off the caterers’ trays without as much as a thank you, willfully blinded by the dehumanizing uniforms.
They knew the mosquitoes weren’t biting them, but didn’t think about why. Derrick was the Higgs Boson that kept the mosquitoes away. The caterers were the Higgs Boson that brought them food and drink. The small dishes that they held in one hand were clean, but how did they get clean? The Higgs Boson dishwasher.
Ben felt like his eyes had opened for the first time. He looked around the garden and saw Higgs Bosons everywhere. He needed to get it on paper quickly before he forgot.
He flipped to a new page in his notebook and began to furiously write down his new Higgs Boson poem. It wasn’t a sell-out poem. It was rhyme-less, rhythm-less, gritty and grimy. It was about how it felt to be a Higgs Boson. All these physicists were trying to find the Higgs Boson. To find a Higgs Boson, you had to think like one. Ben knew what it felt like when your job title was also the name of a machine. Dishwasher. It was like having a job as a blender. Or an electric toothbrush. An electric toothbrush that cleaned teeth like a dentist, only more suicidal.
Ben wrote about the Higgs Boson of flowers: the gardeners. “Taste the sweat of Higgs Boson Gardener,” he wrote. “Doing the dirty work, handling the fertilizer, measuring the PH levels in the soil.”
His new poem, My Name is Higgs Boson, was brilliant. Not a false brilliance like The Particle of Love, but an authentic brilliance rooted in the backbreaking labor of the oppressed.
He was back. His brief flirtation with selling out was over. When Elizabeth called him up to the gazebo to read a poem, he would read My Name is Higgs Boson. It would probably horribly offend these people. They didn’t want to know how their dishes got clean, but they were going to find out anyway.
***
Elizabeth stood in the center of the gazebo and raised her hand, indication she wanted to make a speech. The chattering died down and everyone turned toward her.
“You’re probably wondering how my flowers got so big and luscious,” she said and paused for dramatic effect. “I’ll tell you: Love. The answer is love. Everyone needs love. People, animals, plants. Everyone. Scientists are just beginning to understand what the poets knew all along: love greatly increases botanical yield. Scientists used to say that all plants needed were nutrients from the soil, water, and sunlight. But new studies are rebutting the myth of photosynthesis, that flowers are hyper-independent. We’re so used to associating flowers with beauty, but flowers don’t always realize how beautiful they are. They feel insecure, just like the rest of us, and need to be told. And what better way than through poetry?”
Ben saw Howard Roseman standing alone in the grass near the gazebo. He had a hand on his throat and was making a gagging expression; apparently he thought flowers were being too sensitive.
“And now,” Elizabeth continued. “I’d like to introduce our newest poet here at Roseman Gardens, a promising young man with a unique free-verse style: Ben.”
The crowd clapped enthusiastically and a few people whistled at Ben as he ascended the gazebo steps. A slight breeze gusted through, blowing Ben’s poet scarf. Ben squeezed his way to the center of the gazebo, between Derrick and Elizabeth.
The clapping died down and the crowd smiled at Ben. They were probably expecting pleasant rhymes about love and meadows, but they were going to get something else altogether: unrhyming verses about sweaty unshaven workingmen, jet black from coal mine dust. Ben flipped his notebook open to the page with My Name is Higgs Boson.
Behind the crowd, in the grass outside the gazebo, Howard Roseman was grabbing his neck, making a choking signal. Choke, he was telling Ben. You’re going to choke!
Well, Ben would show him. He’d show everyone who didn’t believe in him. His father Max, Pat Henderson, Fat Reggie from the restaurant, and Howard Roseman. Ben cleared his throat and took a deep breath. He was going to do the best recitation ever.
Howard Roseman fell to his knees and frantically scratched at his throat. Maybe he was really choking, Ben thought. That would explain why his face was turning purple and his eyes bulging out of their sockets.
“He’s choking!” Ben shouted.
Everyone smiled at him. A few people nodded their heads at their neighbors. He was such a passionate poet. The flowers were choking because the soil wasn’t sufficiently oxidized and needed to be aerated. With Love.
“Someone do something!” Ben shouted. He stuffed his notebook back in his pocket, pushed his way through the crowd, and hurdled the gazebo railing. He landed hard on the grass below, sending bolts of pain shooting up his legs.
“What’s he doing?” a woman asked.
“It’s art,” a man explained knowledgably.
Ben quickly hobbled over to Professor Roseman who was scratching weakly at his neck and whose eyes were rolling back. Ben went behind him, wrapped his arms around his midsection, and then remembered with dismay that he didn’t know the Heimlich maneuver. Oh well, he had seen it done enough on TV. How hard could it be? He clasped his hands together into a ball, grasped Roseman’s skeletal frame, and crushed his stomach with all his strength.
No luck. No food flew out of his mouth. Roseman went limp; he had lost consciousness. Ben pulled again as hard as he could, lifting Roseman high into the air. Ben felt his legs slip out from under him and he fell backwards, suplexing Howard Roseman on the grass.
The old man was sprawled out on his back, about to die. Ben’s father had been right. Poetry was useless. Ben didn’t have any practical skills. Poetry couldn’t clear out Professor Roseman’s windpipe.
Or could it?
Ben pulled the blue plastic medium-point pen out of his pocket. He pulled off the cap, bit down on the front end of it, loosening the plastic tip, and dropped the tip of the pen on the grass along with the plastic ink cartridge. He also bit off the little piece of plastic that sealed the back of the pen. He was left with a hollow plastic tube. He was going to have to perform a tracheotomy; sticking the pen into the blocked windpipe to create an alternate path for oxygen. He had seen it done on TV on one of those medical shows, ER or possibly MacGyver. It seemed like the kind of thing MacGyver would do.
There was no time to wait for someone else to help. Roseman’s face was dark purple and red streaks ran down his neck. Every second, lack of oxygen was destroying brain cells; brain cells needed to find the mysterious Higgs Boson.
Ben knelt over Professor Roseman’s limp figure and set the tip of the plastic tube down on the lower part of his sagging old man neck, close to the collar bones. The sagging flesh reminded Ben of a chicken’s neck. With the palm of his free hand, Ben hammered the pen into Roseman’s neck.
Crunch!
A sharp pain shot through Ben’s hand. He pulled his hand away, squeezed it into a fist, and grimaced. He opened his fist and saw the small circular shape of the pen, indented in his palm.
Screams came from the gazebo. Ben looked down at Roseman. The pen was stuck halfway into his neck, blood oozed out from the sides of the pen, but nothing came from within the plastic tube; he still wasn’t breathing. Ben thought he might have missed the windpipe altogether. He wasn’t very good at anatomy. Or maybe he had done it correctly but something was stuck in the pen, blocking the flow of air. Sometimes, Ben would drink the juice straight out of an orange with a straw. He would shove the straw straight through the peel into the pulpy insides, but he couldn’t suck out the juice because a piece of orange peel would be stuck in the straw. First, he had to suck the orange peel out of the straw. Then he could drink the juice. Maybe a piece of Howard Roseman’s neck skin was jammed in the pen like orange peel in a straw. Ben didn’t want to suck it out, (he didn’t know what old man chicken neck tasted like and didn’t want to find out,) but this was no time for squeamishness; a man’s life hung in the balance.
Ben took a deep breath. Then he realized he needed to breathe out; he couldn’t suck out the blockage if his lungs were full of air. Ben breathed out, pushing his lungs empty, and felt his hands shaking. He could be brave when he had his courage-gathering deep breaths, but without the calming oxygen to relax his blood, he was a coward.
But who was he to complain? Howard Roseman hadn’t inhaled oxygen in several minutes and he wasn’t complaining!
That thought gave Ben the push he needed. He lowered his head and wrapped his mouth around the plastic end of the pen.
“Get out of the way!”
The bartender pushed Ben away and he fell into the grass, hitting the ground hard and rolling.
The bartender pulled open Roseman’s mouth, peered inside, stuck his fingers into his throat, and pulled out a half-chewed hunk or rare roast beef.
Roseman coughed and then gasped in deeply, quickly and desperately: not through the pen, but through his mouth. He stared up at the starry sky, his eyes blinking frantically and watering slightly, the blue Bic plastic medium pen still sticking out of his neck.
The entire party hurried over and gathered in a circle around them. Elizabeth knelt beside her husband.
“Oh Howard,” she said, glancing at the half-chewed beef in the bartender’s hand. “You know the doctor warned you about red meat.”
Howard tried to speak, grimaced, and his hand shot to his neck.
“Don’t try to speak, Howard. You have a pen in your neck.”
He touched the pen, questioningly.
“Don’t take it out,” Elizabeth said. “Just leave it in for now. It might be holding things in. Or be in an artery. Let the paramedics handle this.”
“That’s right,” Ben said. “Leave it in. There’s definitely something lodged in there.”
Roseman furrowed his forehead, raised his eyebrows, and lifted his shoulders as if to say, what happened?
Elizabeth slapped at her wrist and then looked at the dead mosquito sprawled against her skin.
“Derrick!” she called. Derrick was standing all alone in the middle of the gazebo. “Could you come over here please?”
Derrick sighed, lowered his shoulders, and trudged over to the crowd in the grass.
Ben explained to Professor Roseman what had happened after he blacked out. How he had tried in vain to perform the Heimlich maneuver, jammed a pen into his throat, and was about to try sucking out whatever was lodged in there when the bartender came and pulled the meat out of his throat.
Howard’s face was pale, his eyes glassy and confused-looking. Maybe he had suffered brain damage, or maybe he was just exhausted from almost suffocation. He opened his mouth to speak again, grimaced in pain, and grabbed his neck. Ben knew how frustrating it could be not to be able to communicate; he had the same situation with Juan, the Hispanic dishwasher.
Roseman made a writing motion with his hand, signaling for something to write with. Ben flipped his notebook open to a blank page, handed it to Professor Roseman, and felt his pockets for his pen. Where was it?
Oh. Right. It was in Professor Roseman’s neck. But the writing part wasn’t. The plastic ink tube and the pen tip was somewhere in the grass.
“Just a sec,” Ben said and began combing through the grass like he was searching for a lost contact lens.
Before Ben located the writing part of his pen, a tall man reached into his tan sport coat, pulled out a pen, and handed it to Howard Roseman. It was a nice pen, not a cheap Bic like Ben’s. A dark polished wood-plated fountain pen, the kind favored by executives of heartless corporations for signing downsizing orders. When Howard took off the pen cap, Ben saw that the pen’s tip was plated in gold. The ball-point looked sharp; probably fine-point.
Howard dropped Ben’s notebook to the grass, raised the pen high above his head in a stabbing grip, and ran at Ben.
Ben stumbled and just barely jumped out of the way in time. The thrust missed his head by millimeters. Howard Roseman, his face gnarled and twisted, ran after Ben, trying to stab him with the pen.
Howard was too old to run properly. He sort of shuffled after Ben, the blue Bic pen bobbing up and down in his neck, but he shuffled with great determination. He kept pursuing Ben in circles around the gazebo and all around the garden until the paramedics arrived.
Ben figured that the party was over, for him at least. They probably wouldn’t let him recite My Name is Higgs Boson now. He was worse than the poet who ran over the flowers with a riding lawn mower.
***
ט''ו באלול תשס''ז
ירושלים
August 29, 2007
Jerusalem
The caterers wore black pants and white shirts. Ben thought this uniform was meant to dehumanize them, so the guests wouldn’t feel uncomfortable with fellow human-beings subservient to them. The caterers strode across the grass between the kitchen and the gazebo, carrying silver trays of hors d’oeuvres: hunks of rare roast beef on rice cakes, stuffed mushrooms, squares of cheese on toothpicks, caviar on small squares of toast. When Derrick reached for a stuffed mushroom, the caterer jerked the tray away. Apparently the food was only for the guests, not the employees
***
After throwing his ice cubes in Ben’s face and deciding that Ben “wasn’t worth it,” Howard Roseman stormed off to the bar to get himself another drink. On the way, he snatched a platter of appetizers from a passing caterer and wolfed them down greedily.
Ben didn’t feel too upset from the throwing of the ice in his face. He was too inspired to feel humiliation or any other emotion. The inspiration flushed out every other feeling and filled him with tingles. He whipped out his notebook, his blue Bic plastic pen, (it was a workingman’s pen; medium point, not bourgeois fine point,) and composed The Particle of Love, comparing the intangibility of True Love to the mysterious Higgs Boson.
At first, Ben thought his poem was great, but then he realized he was feeling a false inspiration. His poem had nothing about the workingman, it rhymed, and his father would like it. He had sold out.
Ben looked up at the gazebo and saw the crowd laughing merrily, impervious to Derrick’s misery as insects devoured him. No one even offered to bring him a fly swatter. They snatched food and drinks off the caterers’ trays without as much as a thank you, willfully blinded by the dehumanizing uniforms.
They knew the mosquitoes weren’t biting them, but didn’t think about why. Derrick was the Higgs Boson that kept the mosquitoes away. The caterers were the Higgs Boson that brought them food and drink. The small dishes that they held in one hand were clean, but how did they get clean? The Higgs Boson dishwasher.
Ben felt like his eyes had opened for the first time. He looked around the garden and saw Higgs Bosons everywhere. He needed to get it on paper quickly before he forgot.
He flipped to a new page in his notebook and began to furiously write down his new Higgs Boson poem. It wasn’t a sell-out poem. It was rhyme-less, rhythm-less, gritty and grimy. It was about how it felt to be a Higgs Boson. All these physicists were trying to find the Higgs Boson. To find a Higgs Boson, you had to think like one. Ben knew what it felt like when your job title was also the name of a machine. Dishwasher. It was like having a job as a blender. Or an electric toothbrush. An electric toothbrush that cleaned teeth like a dentist, only more suicidal.
Ben wrote about the Higgs Boson of flowers: the gardeners. “Taste the sweat of Higgs Boson Gardener,” he wrote. “Doing the dirty work, handling the fertilizer, measuring the PH levels in the soil.”
His new poem, My Name is Higgs Boson, was brilliant. Not a false brilliance like The Particle of Love, but an authentic brilliance rooted in the backbreaking labor of the oppressed.
He was back. His brief flirtation with selling out was over. When Elizabeth called him up to the gazebo to read a poem, he would read My Name is Higgs Boson. It would probably horribly offend these people. They didn’t want to know how their dishes got clean, but they were going to find out anyway.
***
Elizabeth stood in the center of the gazebo and raised her hand, indication she wanted to make a speech. The chattering died down and everyone turned toward her.
“You’re probably wondering how my flowers got so big and luscious,” she said and paused for dramatic effect. “I’ll tell you: Love. The answer is love. Everyone needs love. People, animals, plants. Everyone. Scientists are just beginning to understand what the poets knew all along: love greatly increases botanical yield. Scientists used to say that all plants needed were nutrients from the soil, water, and sunlight. But new studies are rebutting the myth of photosynthesis, that flowers are hyper-independent. We’re so used to associating flowers with beauty, but flowers don’t always realize how beautiful they are. They feel insecure, just like the rest of us, and need to be told. And what better way than through poetry?”
Ben saw Howard Roseman standing alone in the grass near the gazebo. He had a hand on his throat and was making a gagging expression; apparently he thought flowers were being too sensitive.
“And now,” Elizabeth continued. “I’d like to introduce our newest poet here at Roseman Gardens, a promising young man with a unique free-verse style: Ben.”
The crowd clapped enthusiastically and a few people whistled at Ben as he ascended the gazebo steps. A slight breeze gusted through, blowing Ben’s poet scarf. Ben squeezed his way to the center of the gazebo, between Derrick and Elizabeth.
The clapping died down and the crowd smiled at Ben. They were probably expecting pleasant rhymes about love and meadows, but they were going to get something else altogether: unrhyming verses about sweaty unshaven workingmen, jet black from coal mine dust. Ben flipped his notebook open to the page with My Name is Higgs Boson.
Behind the crowd, in the grass outside the gazebo, Howard Roseman was grabbing his neck, making a choking signal. Choke, he was telling Ben. You’re going to choke!
Well, Ben would show him. He’d show everyone who didn’t believe in him. His father Max, Pat Henderson, Fat Reggie from the restaurant, and Howard Roseman. Ben cleared his throat and took a deep breath. He was going to do the best recitation ever.
Howard Roseman fell to his knees and frantically scratched at his throat. Maybe he was really choking, Ben thought. That would explain why his face was turning purple and his eyes bulging out of their sockets.
“He’s choking!” Ben shouted.
Everyone smiled at him. A few people nodded their heads at their neighbors. He was such a passionate poet. The flowers were choking because the soil wasn’t sufficiently oxidized and needed to be aerated. With Love.
“Someone do something!” Ben shouted. He stuffed his notebook back in his pocket, pushed his way through the crowd, and hurdled the gazebo railing. He landed hard on the grass below, sending bolts of pain shooting up his legs.
“What’s he doing?” a woman asked.
“It’s art,” a man explained knowledgably.
Ben quickly hobbled over to Professor Roseman who was scratching weakly at his neck and whose eyes were rolling back. Ben went behind him, wrapped his arms around his midsection, and then remembered with dismay that he didn’t know the Heimlich maneuver. Oh well, he had seen it done enough on TV. How hard could it be? He clasped his hands together into a ball, grasped Roseman’s skeletal frame, and crushed his stomach with all his strength.
No luck. No food flew out of his mouth. Roseman went limp; he had lost consciousness. Ben pulled again as hard as he could, lifting Roseman high into the air. Ben felt his legs slip out from under him and he fell backwards, suplexing Howard Roseman on the grass.
The old man was sprawled out on his back, about to die. Ben’s father had been right. Poetry was useless. Ben didn’t have any practical skills. Poetry couldn’t clear out Professor Roseman’s windpipe.
Or could it?
Ben pulled the blue plastic medium-point pen out of his pocket. He pulled off the cap, bit down on the front end of it, loosening the plastic tip, and dropped the tip of the pen on the grass along with the plastic ink cartridge. He also bit off the little piece of plastic that sealed the back of the pen. He was left with a hollow plastic tube. He was going to have to perform a tracheotomy; sticking the pen into the blocked windpipe to create an alternate path for oxygen. He had seen it done on TV on one of those medical shows, ER or possibly MacGyver. It seemed like the kind of thing MacGyver would do.
There was no time to wait for someone else to help. Roseman’s face was dark purple and red streaks ran down his neck. Every second, lack of oxygen was destroying brain cells; brain cells needed to find the mysterious Higgs Boson.
Ben knelt over Professor Roseman’s limp figure and set the tip of the plastic tube down on the lower part of his sagging old man neck, close to the collar bones. The sagging flesh reminded Ben of a chicken’s neck. With the palm of his free hand, Ben hammered the pen into Roseman’s neck.
Crunch!
A sharp pain shot through Ben’s hand. He pulled his hand away, squeezed it into a fist, and grimaced. He opened his fist and saw the small circular shape of the pen, indented in his palm.
Screams came from the gazebo. Ben looked down at Roseman. The pen was stuck halfway into his neck, blood oozed out from the sides of the pen, but nothing came from within the plastic tube; he still wasn’t breathing. Ben thought he might have missed the windpipe altogether. He wasn’t very good at anatomy. Or maybe he had done it correctly but something was stuck in the pen, blocking the flow of air. Sometimes, Ben would drink the juice straight out of an orange with a straw. He would shove the straw straight through the peel into the pulpy insides, but he couldn’t suck out the juice because a piece of orange peel would be stuck in the straw. First, he had to suck the orange peel out of the straw. Then he could drink the juice. Maybe a piece of Howard Roseman’s neck skin was jammed in the pen like orange peel in a straw. Ben didn’t want to suck it out, (he didn’t know what old man chicken neck tasted like and didn’t want to find out,) but this was no time for squeamishness; a man’s life hung in the balance.
Ben took a deep breath. Then he realized he needed to breathe out; he couldn’t suck out the blockage if his lungs were full of air. Ben breathed out, pushing his lungs empty, and felt his hands shaking. He could be brave when he had his courage-gathering deep breaths, but without the calming oxygen to relax his blood, he was a coward.
But who was he to complain? Howard Roseman hadn’t inhaled oxygen in several minutes and he wasn’t complaining!
That thought gave Ben the push he needed. He lowered his head and wrapped his mouth around the plastic end of the pen.
“Get out of the way!”
The bartender pushed Ben away and he fell into the grass, hitting the ground hard and rolling.
The bartender pulled open Roseman’s mouth, peered inside, stuck his fingers into his throat, and pulled out a half-chewed hunk or rare roast beef.
Roseman coughed and then gasped in deeply, quickly and desperately: not through the pen, but through his mouth. He stared up at the starry sky, his eyes blinking frantically and watering slightly, the blue Bic plastic medium pen still sticking out of his neck.
The entire party hurried over and gathered in a circle around them. Elizabeth knelt beside her husband.
“Oh Howard,” she said, glancing at the half-chewed beef in the bartender’s hand. “You know the doctor warned you about red meat.”
Howard tried to speak, grimaced, and his hand shot to his neck.
“Don’t try to speak, Howard. You have a pen in your neck.”
He touched the pen, questioningly.
“Don’t take it out,” Elizabeth said. “Just leave it in for now. It might be holding things in. Or be in an artery. Let the paramedics handle this.”
“That’s right,” Ben said. “Leave it in. There’s definitely something lodged in there.”
Roseman furrowed his forehead, raised his eyebrows, and lifted his shoulders as if to say, what happened?
Elizabeth slapped at her wrist and then looked at the dead mosquito sprawled against her skin.
“Derrick!” she called. Derrick was standing all alone in the middle of the gazebo. “Could you come over here please?”
Derrick sighed, lowered his shoulders, and trudged over to the crowd in the grass.
Ben explained to Professor Roseman what had happened after he blacked out. How he had tried in vain to perform the Heimlich maneuver, jammed a pen into his throat, and was about to try sucking out whatever was lodged in there when the bartender came and pulled the meat out of his throat.
Howard’s face was pale, his eyes glassy and confused-looking. Maybe he had suffered brain damage, or maybe he was just exhausted from almost suffocation. He opened his mouth to speak again, grimaced in pain, and grabbed his neck. Ben knew how frustrating it could be not to be able to communicate; he had the same situation with Juan, the Hispanic dishwasher.
Roseman made a writing motion with his hand, signaling for something to write with. Ben flipped his notebook open to a blank page, handed it to Professor Roseman, and felt his pockets for his pen. Where was it?
Oh. Right. It was in Professor Roseman’s neck. But the writing part wasn’t. The plastic ink tube and the pen tip was somewhere in the grass.
“Just a sec,” Ben said and began combing through the grass like he was searching for a lost contact lens.
Before Ben located the writing part of his pen, a tall man reached into his tan sport coat, pulled out a pen, and handed it to Howard Roseman. It was a nice pen, not a cheap Bic like Ben’s. A dark polished wood-plated fountain pen, the kind favored by executives of heartless corporations for signing downsizing orders. When Howard took off the pen cap, Ben saw that the pen’s tip was plated in gold. The ball-point looked sharp; probably fine-point.
Howard dropped Ben’s notebook to the grass, raised the pen high above his head in a stabbing grip, and ran at Ben.
Ben stumbled and just barely jumped out of the way in time. The thrust missed his head by millimeters. Howard Roseman, his face gnarled and twisted, ran after Ben, trying to stab him with the pen.
Howard was too old to run properly. He sort of shuffled after Ben, the blue Bic pen bobbing up and down in his neck, but he shuffled with great determination. He kept pursuing Ben in circles around the gazebo and all around the garden until the paramedics arrived.
Ben figured that the party was over, for him at least. They probably wouldn’t let him recite My Name is Higgs Boson now. He was worse than the poet who ran over the flowers with a riding lawn mower.
***
ט''ו באלול תשס''ז
ירושלים
August 29, 2007
Jerusalem
posted by Benjamin Fishbein at Wednesday, August 29, 2007
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home