FFR 160
To the Esteemed Connoisseurs of Fowl Feathered Review, that Feathered Folly of Frivolity,
Picture, if you will, a Tuesday evening so steeped in serenity that even the crickets—those indefatigable troubadours of the twilight—had silenced their fiddles, gawping at the stillness like tourists at a cathedral of hush. Beneath the railway trestle, a structure as rickety as a dowager’s corset, one Markus Klotz, hermit extraordinaire and hygiene’s sworn nemesis, squatted cross-legged on a gravel mattress, polishing the dashboard of his latest vehicular conquest with the manic zeal of a man who’d stumbled upon the Rosetta Stone of chrome. The sun, that cosmic prima donna, executed a flamboyant exit stage west, draping elongated shadows over three rubber ducks perched on the windshield—sentinels of silliness, gazing out with the stoic dignity of bath toys conscripted into absurdity.
Markus, ever the mogul of the marginal, fiddled with his cellphone, his fingers darting like a caffeinated cephalopod’s tentacles, poised to fling his jalopy onto Craigslist for the sixth time that annum. His hands, precise as a watchmaker who’d moonlighted as a sideshow blade-chucker, sealed each deal with a handshake and the plaintive, almost embarrassed *quack* of his rubbery retinue.
But hark! As Markus reached for a pistachio from a sack that might as well have borne the label “Pandora’s Party Mix,” his digits began to shimmer with a phosphorescence straight out of a dime-store sci-fi rag. The shell split, not to yield a humble nut, but a miniature defibrillator, fully operational and humming with the gravitas of a gadget from a Bond flick’s cutting-room floor. “Well, I’ll be a monkey’s taxidermist,” he muttered, turning it over in his hands like a man handed the ignition key to a UFO he hadn’t requisitioned. “Reckon I’ll need this for the finale.” Into his pocket it went, nestling beside a napkin ring he’d scavenged earlier—because, dear reader, why *not*?
“…and the buyer always wants to rendezvous at the witching hour,” Markus soliloquized to the void, his voice trailing off as a squirrel scampered across the gravel, pausing to adjust a diminutive fedora—yes, a fedora, because even rodents now fancy themselves film noir extras. The creature then ascended the trestle, leaving a wake of glitter that twinkled with the ominous promise of a hangover yet to come. Markus sighed, a sound akin to the rustle of a shrug made audible. “I really ought to lay off these pistachios,” he declared, popping another into his maw with the fatalistic air of a man who’d long ago surrendered to the universe’s penchant for practical jokes.
And then—poof!—the trestle vanished, as if yanked offstage by a stagehand with a grudge. Markus found himself plunked into a Marrakech souk, the air thick with cumin and the cacophony of merchants haggling like they were auditioning for the role of “Most Belligerent Baritone” in a Wagnerian opera. A vendor, his face etched with the weariness of a man who’d seen one too many tourists haggle over a brass lamp, thrust a tarnished napkin ring into Markus’s hands, hissing, “Behold, the skeleton key to the lunar colonies!” Before Markus could muster a retort—or even process the fact that he now clutched what appeared to be the MacGuffin of a particularly lackluster spy caper—the scene melted away, replaced by the desolate, dusty expanse of a lunar landscape. The napkin ring rolled across the regolith, coming to rest at the paws of a Siamese cat sporting a henna tattoo that proclaimed, in elegant script, “I quit.”
Dear reader, you may well ask how Markus landed in this lunar loony bin. To which we, the editorial cabal of *Fowl Feathered Review*, reply: your guess is as good as ours! But let us remind you, lest you’ve misplaced the memo, that this is the 160th issue of our esteemed rag, a publication that teeters on the tightrope between sense and senselessness with the grace of a drunken flamingo. If you’re feeling unmoored, spare a thought for Bartholomew, my prize Rhode Island Red, who is currently attempting to expound string theory to a gaggle of pigeons, only to be heckled with queries about sentient doorknobs.
Markus, now miraculously back beneath the trestle—because even the cosmos, it seems, has a soft spot for narrative bookends—clutched his trio of rubber ducks with the fervor of a man clinging to the last lifeboat on the Titanic of reason. He pondered the cars he’d peddled, the lives they’d ferried, and the ducks that had borne witness to it all. A queer cocktail of pride and melancholy washed over him, tinged with the faint aftertaste of pistachios. He didn’t know why, but he sensed his hourglass was running low on sand. Reaching for another nut, he murmured, “Here’s hoping the next owner’s a duck fancier.”
And then, as if the universe had been waiting in the wings with a custard pie, his head transmogrified into a pineapple.
The trestle, the ducks, and the pineapple-headed Markus evaporated, replaced by a lecture hall where a professor was holding forth on Indonesian burial rites through a feminist lens, with all the gravitas of a man explaining quantum physics to a goldfish. A glass of seawater gleamed on the podium, winking under the fluorescent glare like a prop from an Ionesco play. The professor halted mid-sentence, fixed you, dear reader, with a stare, and declared, “None of this adds up, does it? Splendid. Onward!”
“…and thus, we must interrogate the socio-political ramifications of—oh, look, a defibrillator!” The professor snatched up the device, which had materialized on the desk like a magician’s rabbit, and handed it to a student in the front row. “Just in case,” they said, with a wink that suggested they were privy to the punchline of a cosmic jest.
We, the collective delirium of *Fowl Feathered Review*, fully concede that this tale is as stable as a unicycle on a tightrope of al dente linguine. But isn’t that the charm? Life, much like our humble periodical, is a cavalcade of non sequiturs, stitched together with the occasional rubber duck and a dusting of glitter.
Markus, now but a memory, leaves behind a legacy of ducks, jalopies, and pistachios. His saga, though preposterous, whispers to us that even in the maelstrom of madness, there lies meaning. We are all, in our way, peddlers of used cars beneath life’s railway trestles, and sometimes, that’s quite enough.
Yours in Feathered Farcicality,
Virgil Kay,
Editor, Rooster, and Devotee of the China Wok’s Finer Egg Rolls
LINK:
Music: https://youtu.be/3HeI0zvHyNE?si=Eih7Mbdw4yfbzmVC
MORE MUSIC: https://youtu.be/BrLQkbnBK7w?si=CgeGL7wqygpq88iX
MOVIE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0WUJKo-vY4&t=721s
