Picnic Table on the Front Lawn

 Picnic Table on the Front Lawn

        By Mme. Rouge de la Reimer

            wango walker went to work

            early in the morning

            he felt the sudden need to shirk

            take him without warning

"Separatists be damned, I say!" said Sammy, the tailor. Sammy owned a little shop off Henry Street in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He made a meagre living sewing suits for older clientele. In his breast he longed for a shop with air-conditioning, central heating, shiny floors, big windows, and trees outside on the front lawn where he might sit with a cup of coffee during coffee break and lunch just to watch the traffic go by and know that he was well-heeled. 

          One day, when he was not expecting anyone because the sky, gray and heavy, dropped showers on the street, the bell announced that someone had entered the door so he left his back room and came to serve. He saw no one. He shook his head. He had no sooner turned his back to go to his sewing machine when he heard a loud voice calling for assistance. Sammy looked but still saw no one. Then he noticed a hand on the counter and he hurried to look over it and there stood a man of three feet height smiling at him.

        "You thought you were mistaken, didn't you?" The little fellow said, and laughed a great hearty laugh.

        "What do you want?" Sammy inquired, feeling slightly insulted and disinclined to tolerate viterbutation from a small person. The small man laughed again, then drew a pistol from his great coat pocket that he pointed smartly at Sammy's head.

        "That's what I want!" he said. I wish to kill you immediately, but I will wait for a moment till I have enjoyed the sight of your discomfort as well as your intense fear." The floor beneath the little man with its mucky appearance took Sammy's eye. The ragged wall with its torn paper and no insulation to prevent the seeping cold did too.

        "Good! Finally! Someone with the guts to make an end to my miserable existence! I've been waiting for you. Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! I am so glad that you have come! You see, being a firm believer, a Catholic, I cannot end my own life. But, I have been living in such awful poverty for so long and have made so many enemies in the tailoring business that I have long desired nothing so much as a cessation to this tedium. Thank you for coming to help me end it so that you will have to face eternal punishment and not I!" So saying Sammy leapt over the counter and sat down with his back to the little man, a huge smile on his face. He waited. Nothing. He turned around and looked back at the person holding the armament.

        "Well, what are you waiting for?" He glanced about the room and checked his watch, as if worried time would interfere.

        "Come on!" he said and stood up and took the little man by the collar and shook him a little. He sat down again and waited, his back once more offered up. He hummed a ditty about a bird in a tree that gets hit by lightning. The smell of his tailoring practice, old sweaty suit pants never washed, overcame him and he almost wretched. Nothing.

        "What? Art a coward?" he inquired suddenly, a ferocity in his voice past all show. "You're a snivelling coward. Someone ought teach you a lesson!" With that, Sammy jumped up and in a trice had the little person by the collar and in a vicious headlock. He pulled him up off the ground to the height of the light above, turned him upside down and let him fall to the floor headfirst. His skull cracked and made a noise as of china crashing. The little guy moaned and, the gun still in his hand, attempted to point it at the man before him. He could not hold it steady.

        "Still reluctant, art t'ou? Well, we'll see about that!" Sammy grabbed his assailant by his ankles and twirled him rapidly and with increasing force around his head until he felt dizzy himself.  He turned him six times and let go. The body of the three footer flew straight for the door. It smashed through the glass and landed outside in the snowbank. It lay there motionless. A trolley bus came by at that moment and the wheels on the curb-side rolled over the quiet form and squished it shapeless. Sammy came to the door to see, noticed that all was up for his customer and, shaking his head, returned to his back room chair and his sewing.