Treacle Toffee Month
Katherine Coleman pressed her hands against the wall and pushed until her legs began to tremble and her palms to bleed. Passers-by looked on in confusion. The building would not budge. “Hell!” she cried, “how am I going to bring Michael Jackson back from the dead if I can’t even topple a small family restaurant?” She straightened up and stretched her aching muscles. “Another whimsical project that I’ll never get off the ground.”
Katherine had not been happy for a long time; not since childhood, in fact. In school she had been regarded as a very bright pupil, and her teachers had spoiled her, ultimately setting her on a path of wastage and fecklessness. Now she was 32 years old and a professional plumber, though not a good one. “I should have gone to college,” she whined. “I should have studied law, like I always said I would.” Katherine hung her head and began to sob, quietly at first, then louder and louder until she was practically bawling in the street, so that the proprietor of the restaurant, an elderly Greek man with a fine waxed moustache, was obliged to come out and comfort her; despite his best efforts, she would not stop, and he eventually went back inside to call the police, thinking that she was an escaped mental patient or something, since there was a mental institute not far from there and it was not unheard of for its inhabitants to wander off the property and attack people, although the last incident of that kind had occurred all the way back in 1977, long before the Greek restaurant proprietor had even moved to the country; back then he was still living in his mother’s apartment in Paris with his German lover Josef, who had been the great love of his life, when he came to think about it.
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