Every morning before Ubu left to catch the bus for work he would stop by the little man to buy a bottle of water. The water came in bottles made of patchworks of sea glass and he like to collect them on his mantelpiece. The little man came in a wooden hut made of two-by-fours that were painted in alternating colors of royal blue and white. Royal white was what the man claimed the second color was, but Ubu just called it white because he’d never seen any royalty wear white before. One bottle, one morning. Ubu’s mantelpiece was packed like zooids in a siphonophore.

“All gone,” the little man in the hut was saying. His eyes were level with the counter that he used to pass change with customers. If he stood too far to the left, say to reach something on a shelf, the boxes of chocolate bars on the counter hid him view completely. No one bought any of the chocolate bars because every store had the same box of chocolate bars next to the counter. They were used as a landmark to guide customers, a local symbol saying, “Yes, you’ve found the place where change is passed back-and-forth.”

“All of it?” replied Ubu just to make conversation. His mouth decided to ask a question but his mind was busying indulging in some reading, reading the sign on the box of chocolate bars. It read “65p – velvety cream encased in milky chocolate” in a font that a calligraphic monk from the thirteen-hundreds would have been disappointed in.

“Yep, all gone. They came yesterday, packed it all up real efficient-like and left his morning.” It was looking like Ubu wouldn’t get his bottle of water this morning and his baptism streak would be cut short at four-hundred and one. Ubu was superstitious about ending on four-hundred and one because it was a prime number and he’d only seen bad things happen around prime numbers. He made it his life’s work to memorize as many prime numbers as he could so that he could steer clear of potential encounters with them. Ubu wasn’t happy about this so he decided to try a grocery store nearby, turning to leave the little man by himself in the hut.

“You won’t find’t if you’re looking elsewhere,” the little man sent the words towards Ubu’s back and poked a nod at the grocery store that was across from his hut. It had a big sign on it that read “Dan Royal’s Roots and Fruits” with a large octopus entangling itself excitedly inside all the holes in the r’s, o’s, and d’s. It seemed to actively avoid a’s. Like his prime number superstitions, Ubu always imagined that the octopus was superstitious for letters that pointed the wrong direction. Right now Ubu wasn’t interested in octopus superstitions because what the little man had said was confusing enough to pay some interest in. Ubu turned around.

“What do you mean? Surely they sell –“

“All gone. Like I said.”

Ubu squeezed his pink forehead down like a half-lemon being gutted, “All of it.”

“All gone. All gone.” It was like the man had become a seagull enjoying cawing to gray skies of the city from behind a torn trash bag. All gone. All-gone. Al-gon. Ahgon. Ahgon! Ahgon!

Ubu’s had fully gutted the lemon in his lemon face so he couldn’t intensify his emotional surprise for the little man. Instead he froze his face in a wrinkled mess of unblinking confusion, trying to prompt further info from the little seagull man.

“They sold it all, every last drop. Ponds, rivers, lakes, lochs, Atlantic all the way right round to the Pacific. Whop!” – and here he made a swooshing gesture with his arms as if he had taken all the air around him in his two hands and thrown it to the sky – “All gone.”

“Wha…” dribbled Ubu with lemony words to the seagull.

“Look, mate, I’m not a news anchor, have a paper,” and he stuffed a newspaper like it was a handkerchief of leather towards Ubu. Almost by habit, they both took a moment to exchange change across the counter before returning to their characters. Ubu looked at the newspaper and it read in large red letters:

ALL GONE!

Below it was two photos, Ubu cracked the newspaper like a whip to dishevel some creases and correct the distortions in the photo. The first photo was a wide shot of Gasworks Park, Seattle, the grass was gay and the abandoned factories ornamenting the greenery were particularly charming in the sunlight. For a moment Ubu thought he was holding the photo upside-down but returned it to the correct way up when he realized he’d flipped a picnicking family on their head. He now realized what was amiss: there were caustics on the park, all along the grass, and shooting up the sides of the abandoned factories like the entire thing had been miniaturized and shoveled into the deep-end of the pool. Caustics were the little wavy worms on the bottom of the deep end of the pool when you opened your eyes quickly before they burn. Floating above the picnickers, the abandoned factories, the gay grass, and the entire skyline of the city was the Pacific Ocean, neatly cut into little cubes of water that were being sucked skyward by a great force.

Ahgon! Ahgon! Ubu was having a difficult time realizing that he was Ubu, a human on planet Earth, his mind was in overdrive as it threw open and closed cupboards and drawers in Ubu’s life to try to make sense of this phenomenon. It eventually found a solution, a recovery tactic: ignore it for now and do the next task we wanted to do, look at the second picture. Ubu decided to look at the second picture.

Here Ubu’s mind was in more familiar territory. It was the Oval Room which Ubu had seen many times on news reels and TV shows, it had a homely air about it. There were the Presidents of the United States, all four of them, standing and looking very formal in their blouses and jackets. There was the big desk which seated all four presidents behind it side-by-side as they worked on important business. That was the red phone with four earpieces so all four presidents could take important calls. And there was a Pituip standing across from the presidents, shaking the hands of all of them simultaneously with its long eight sinewy arms. The Pituip was wearing galactic-grade bari-armour donned with many Pituip medals from famous galactic battles of the Pituips. Pituip emotional displays are the opposite of human emotional displays because they evolved on a planet five-hundred light-years out from Earth. Every president was displaying a big grin that hung across all their faces like white bunting as they shook the hand of the veteran Pituip. The Pituip’s face was a gutted lemon. Across the entire shot was a piece of red text that some junior graphic designer decided would look nice stretched from the top left to the bottom right of the photograph. The text said “SOLD!”