Читать книгу The Girl Who Was Convinced Beyond All Reason That She Could Fly - Sybil Lamb - Страница 9

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THE WEIRDLY SPECIFIC MARKET

The Weirdly Specific Market always had people coming and going, buying weirdly specific stuff at the market’s weirdly specific stores. Shoppers came to buy enough T-shirts to fill a whole truck or a new set of number buttons for their elevator. Or they went to the strange, dark underground club for eating cheese and looking at pictures. One store only sold bolts and screws, and one store only sold empty takeout containers. There was a specialty shoe–boot place that converted shoes into boots and vice versa. One store was made entirely of rooms of milk crates filled with stereo cables in an old, abandoned department store. The point was: everybody needs some kind of weirdly specific thing at some point. When they did, they came to the market.

The market also had dozens of butchers, cheesers, and bakers. There was a grocer that sold rare, fancy purple and blue apples, and one where you could get a bag of 1,000 carrots for twenty bucks. There were dozens of ice cream and hot snack carts, and Grack? Well, he was the most popular one, thanks to his Infamous 100 Hot Dog Menu.

Since Grack had been running a hot dog cart since before he could read, he had the experience to cleverly figure out that most people would stop and hang out, waiting to see what happens, if, say, they saw some bananas hijinks like a shoeless girl endangering herself by climbing up and jumping off roofs and street lamps and phone poles. Then, once she didn’t actually smash herself into the ground but instead kept on fluttering about like a featherless bird, most people would eventually look down and see the Infamous 100 Hot Dog Menu, which was carefully designed so at least one dog appealed to someone’s particular vice, craving, or guilty pleasure.

With the girl who wasn’t a bird around, people walked past Grack’s cart at half speed and then got even slower.

His business doubled and kept increasing. Before long, regulars at the market had started saying stuff like:

“Hey, let’s get hot dogs from that crazy bike cart with like 100 different kinds of dog. There’s a girl who’s always there and she was probably born and raised in a travelling circus, then abandoned here a few summers ago and adopted by pigeons. She hangs out on top of the traffic light and will jump off it and catch french fries in mid-air. One time, a guy bet her a corn dog that she couldn’t hop, skip, and jump herself to the top of the market water tower, so she took his hat and bounced crazily and carelessly twenty metres up the tower and almost plummeted onto the cement sidewalk a bunch of times. But then she stuck the hat on top like the water tower was wearing it. It’s still up there!”

All the nearby punk rockers from the five-dollars-a-night hotel started called the girl Eggs after her one and only T-shirt that she always wore, all faded and torn up. It read, EGGS, and it was from a TV commercial recommending people eat two servings of eggs daily. She loved that shirt so much that if you tried to tell her chickens can’t fly, she’d just climb up the closest wall away from you.