like a jovial boulder of
blubbering flesh, emanating waves
of saccharine good cheer
more insistent than the Great Boston
Molasses Explosion.
She oozed over to the black and white figure
slumped over in the unpainted wooden chair,
and bellowed in a tornado-siren voice,
"What's wrong, honey? You look flatter
than a roadkill possum!"
Not bothering to look at her,
he replied, almost inaudibly,
"I can't make the fear stop."
The gelatinous mass of femininity
next to him burst out in a good-natured
thunderclap and shouted,
"Well ain't that the shit!"
She wrapped a quivering mass
of friendly arm around his shoulders,
squeezed him like a Moon Pie,
and then snapped his neck like a Popsicle stick.
"Hope that helps, sugar," she chuckled.
Turning like a small planet rotating on its axis,
she exclaimed, to no one in particular,
"Some folks you just can't talk to,"
and orbited back out the doorway.
