“Some spackle, please.”

“Eh?”

“Spackle. Do you have any, please.”

“Are you soft, boy?” A hand came down on the table, like a mousetrap for a guzzard. “Why in the darned hell would any shelf of mine stock spackle. You can’t even sell spackle if I hit you to next Sunday.”

To this, the boy flinched. An involuntary rather than fearful response, the ironing job of his father. The boy decided it was time to leave and, with a soulless heft, sat the sandbag he’d laid at the counter back atop his shoulder. As he made his way to the door, someone called out to him from behind. It came to his ears as iron filings to a magnet and there was nothing soft that could be found even in the undertones.

The carpet, it seemed, needed a good scrub. And so it did, for the sandbag-laden lad peeked at what his feet behind him had done and they had done just what feet would do for a boy of his stature, that is, stepped fourteen times to get from the counter to the exit. The unfortunate case here was that the boy’s feet had picked up certain materials from outside that were usually unwelcome on the inside.

“Here’s your spackle,” the man at the counter said. “On the house.” And then as if instructed by his grammar professor he marked the end of his speech with a coagulated spit right on the nearest footprint.

Of course at this point, as the boy had started trawling through his sandbag for a cloth or a towel or at least something not all oiled up and sticky slick, right as the boy came across a browning sponge, in through the shop entrance came a rooster. Short, stocky, but frightfully well-mannered and not because it said anything like “please” and “thank you” or “good-day fine peach” and “go’bless the early rising soul,” no. It was more in the subtle, intangible way in which it held its feet, or rather claws, in strut. With each step, all three claws came down in sequence and as each talon arrived at the floor they met it with the poise of barber deep in a hot shave. Every person, the boy and the counter man, became transfixed by this pompous bird.

The man at the counter was the first to come out of it: “I have,” came the tones of the man in laconic ribbons of sweet twine, “just the item you are looking for.” And from behind the counter, perhaps kept inside some ornate cubby locked by a very important and large key, did the man pull a shoe, one that could fit three large toes at the end. It was black leather and shined so that on a starry night you could see Andromeda and at least twelve of its billion suns right on it.

The rooster clucked a sickly noise, and the man, for a moment, rescinded the little shoe into the cradle of his armpit to protect it from such vile nature, but returned it to its place just before the rooster looked up again.

“What do you take me for!” shouted the rooster so loud that the boy on the floor put his hands to his ears to protect them. “What do you take me for? What is this anti-innocuous ick you hold before me? Not shoe no, for no encasement of the foot handles three mounds on the end like the Bourdil devil mutated to the moon and back. That smart shine you’ve put upon it wouldn’t even fool a cat, let alone half of one!” It didn’t stop at only these words, but now turned and went back to the exit from whence it had come while cockle-doodling all sorts of something unpleasant.

“To be dismantled,” thought the man at the counter, and put a hand to his forehead as if to hold back his frontal lobe from slopping out onto the floor, “dismantled and shamed by a feathered fool!” His fist hit hard against the counter.

The rooster, it so happens, was once a rank three general in the Alternative Artillery Forces (AARF) at the prime of his youth. This put him right on the front lines where he saw so many men and women die from objects thrown and shot of sizes small, squat, and long and lean. He learned in this time, to avoid anything airborne and only trust what sat on the floor and didn’t budge. This plan held well until his comrade, Arnold Wager, a Colonel of the fifteenth order, stepped on something that did not move, did not fly, and sat still as a tranquillized stork. It did blink though, and not one piece of Arnold Wager could be recovered by the rooster to put in a piece of acrylic on his shelf and preserve the memory of his friend. So to his list, the rooster added ‘blinking’ and came to his most famous Theory of ABB: Airborne, Budge, or Blink, you’re in for a stink.

Therefore the rooster was adept at dealing with projectiles, for so much time had he spent studying both projecting and tiling of orbital deaths. When a shoe, with three toe spots on the front, came arching towards the back head of that rooster, intent on dealing a sizeable bump, the rooster evaded the attack with a squat to its left. This placed the bird right atop the boy, who was back to oggling around his sandbag for something cleaner than dirt. The rooster reached for the sandbag and picked up the boy, and with two strong hands threw him at the man on the counter. Too absorbed in his failed attack, the man at the counter didn’t see the shot until two string knees hit him right across each temple like a calcium vice and he was out cold.

The boy wasn’t bad off by the whole situation, for when he stood himself up and went to check the bruises on his knees, he saw the rooster rummaging through his sandbag. He watched as it pulled out a mop that looked manufactured from a land of pillows, and with a strong beak and a pail of spring water as clear as a mercury dessert, it had its way with the scars the boy had left on the carpet, going with such thoroughness as to invert the textile stain. And before even a squeaked farewell or a whispered thank you could the boy give, the rooster had taken its leave and not without an impressive strut and a tip of its gobble and a wink of its eye.