Spring 2024 - Recrudescence

“Little Fluff”

class, singing schlagers, hit tunes that go You, You, You Rag of a Life! trilled to fubsy old belles by doddering idiots and decadent dotards – how I laughed with the audience, as well as with my otherwise bird broken heart! Back at the Pannonia. Told Attila, the waiter, about the Cinke chick’s death. That it tore my cosmology of God to tatters. That I was by now a no-God person. That it demands answer. And I wasn’t getting it. To which, Attila staggeringly said, ‘Perhaps the little bird’s sacrifice - it served some end - even for you,’ As we stood in the Pannonia’s Turkish carpeted, art-hung, Carrara marbled corridor, he added, ‘There is, there has to be justice, a place of evening-out. For animals as well, or, don’t you see, our own meanings turn into rot’.

‘What!’ I yowled, ‘How!’ I blubbed ‘How does a waiter, your

age, a boy! – get to know all this?’

To which, he, with a shrug of superiority, said, ‘I just know it. Everyone does. Everyone. If a bird suffers without meaning, the Creation loses it too’.

‘You’re kidding me, right?’

‘Nope,’ he laughed at my drop-jawed incredulity, ‘ask

anybody.’

I did. I asked Richie Kaiser, the Pannonia’s pianist. A musical virtuoso boy of 22, Richie thought about it for one entire second or less, and puckering with a laugh, snapped, ‘Of course, I know everything. Even what I don’t, there’s something in me that does. I asked him about the Cinke.

‘Of course, his soul lives!’ Richie looked annoyed by my

interrogating the obvious.

‘How do you know?’

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