Currently untitled, Part 3
While I was searching, another man walked into the shop. A rather large, almost aboriginal looking man, exceeding six feet in height, and had at the least two hundred pounds worth of muscle on him. Clad in only some sort of towel or cloth wrapped around his waist and with a plain wooden staff of four or so feet in his left hand, he strode sharply to the front counter. He stopped about two feet in front of the cash register and dove the end of his staff down at the floor, shattering the silence with the piercing crack of wood on tile. The clerk looked up from his carving and welcomed the large man.
A decapitated head was dropped onto the counter. Somehow I had missed it in the hand that hadn’t been carrying the staff. It was a rather small head, so it could possibly have fit into the large man’s palm, unnoticed. He pointed at the head and addressed the clerk in a foreign language I couldn’t recognize.
The clerk retaliated with a stream of what could only have been insults, presumably in the same language. The large man started getting louder and punched his palm a few times menacingly. The clerk drew his small knife across his carving one last time, and looked at it for a moment before sweeping a silver needle up from the counter. While the large man continued yelling, the clerk smoothly inserted the needle into the end of his whistle, raised it to his lips and blew.
The large man’s speech shuddered to a stop as he clutched his chest and fell to the ground. He made a series of small sounds, revealing that the man was merely unconscious and not dead. I gingerly stepped over him and coughed gently to get the clerk’s attention, since he had returned to his carving, apparently correcting whatever it was he noticed to be wrong when he’d blown into it. He looked up and smiled.
“I didn’t see any frozen yogurt back there.”
“Oh, we must be out. Here, let me go into the back and mix you up another batch.” Despite his frail looking frame, he dragged the prone man with him into the back of the store, and several minutes later I was on my way back home with two fresh pints.
A decapitated head was dropped onto the counter. Somehow I had missed it in the hand that hadn’t been carrying the staff. It was a rather small head, so it could possibly have fit into the large man’s palm, unnoticed. He pointed at the head and addressed the clerk in a foreign language I couldn’t recognize.
The clerk retaliated with a stream of what could only have been insults, presumably in the same language. The large man started getting louder and punched his palm a few times menacingly. The clerk drew his small knife across his carving one last time, and looked at it for a moment before sweeping a silver needle up from the counter. While the large man continued yelling, the clerk smoothly inserted the needle into the end of his whistle, raised it to his lips and blew.
The large man’s speech shuddered to a stop as he clutched his chest and fell to the ground. He made a series of small sounds, revealing that the man was merely unconscious and not dead. I gingerly stepped over him and coughed gently to get the clerk’s attention, since he had returned to his carving, apparently correcting whatever it was he noticed to be wrong when he’d blown into it. He looked up and smiled.
“I didn’t see any frozen yogurt back there.”
“Oh, we must be out. Here, let me go into the back and mix you up another batch.” Despite his frail looking frame, he dragged the prone man with him into the back of the store, and several minutes later I was on my way back home with two fresh pints.