The old lady kept things both small and big, things both wide and long. When a customer came through her door and demanded a geometry that was such and such tall, with flair like an extra corner on top of the standard seven, curvature both Reimman and rudeman, and demands of those sorts, it was her – Olgus Overything – who put it all together to order.

If you saw a shawl on someone’s back and it wasn’t Olgus, it was then an impostor. The highest cakes on a English sandwich tray she could not reach, what with her small stature, but for what she didn’t stock in brawn flakes she made up in brainsin bran. Ladders, ropes, and well-lubed springs were always discovered after Olgus finished dining at the highest of floof tea establishments that had at least five layers on their sandwich trays. Olgus had hands to shape bedrock into functional lillypads. It was the earthernware cookery, she always said, that wore the palms to sandpaper, but we know that one such as her couldn’t meet her customer demand without furious hand work.

Have you ever been consumed, face-first, by the smile of someone else? That moment where you forgot which body and what face is yours, as the smiling buddha before you tunes your senses to the bending of their mouth? Olgus has such a smile. And she swears on the oldest grave in the local churchyard that it has never been used on a customer to turn a sale. On her ears sit two miniature hens, on chains and of glass, and they jangle about when something when she laughs. Nothing, to Olgus, is funny, apart from her maggot nephew and the Great Barrade Show that is on at five every other evening. This is because a well does not feed another well; Olgus is a humorous spring of water.

I met Olgus because I was in need of difficult order and the three contracts before me had failed so miraculously that they had fled the country. The details of the order aren’t so important as the details of the condition of the orderer – that is myself – at the time of ordering. A small vial of psychedelic radishes I had consumed not mere moments before perching my first foot on the first step of her store, wherein a wonderful electric mewing hit the air, for I’d obviously crossed paths with a spritzy laser. By the time my final foot’s heel had made it through the doorway and my entire self was entirely in, the dose of radishes took my visual cortex for a right reeling. What I was sure was wall with a fresh coat of paint was in fact the silk dress of a milkmaid, and where once I saw a shelf of bottled rare sands from beaches all around the world, was in its place, a band of miniature cellist that played a novel rendition of Hark the Harold Angel Sings in the key of C minor. Completely in tears because the lead tenor cellist had closed a moving solo, I turned to a cactus sitting behind the counter near the back wall and forgot myself in its doughy smile. I flinched away when it offered my a hand for a handshake, but after it transformed into a series of doughnut rings connected by lace, I seized it by thumb and iced forefinger and began a siege with my tongue, taking no survivors of the iced pastries before me, my work so acute that I’m certain if it were not for her eyes as small as peppercorns, the lead cellist would have applauded me.

By this point both the ceiling and my two legs had moved to a more comfortable altitude (somewhere between the cumulus and the cirrus), where I could not follow, and I held what was left of me close to itself for fear that it might join my legs in the sky. As a veteran of self-inflicted mind re-boggling, where a junior would lose their wits and end up skimp head-to-toe and dancing a lolly on mayor’s office desk, I kept tabs on my faculties, not letting them get further than an inch from where I could see them. This meant that although every limb was lost, I could still count the apples and weight the change I needed from my grocery purchase, which was the purpose of my visit to Olgus’s Store. Everyone in the town called it Olgus’s Store even though a sign outside read Shmick’s Tasties. Who shimck was I hadn’t a clue, but here it was too late to dawdle on this thought for I was now watching myself watch my hands as they counted out the exact change for the purchase of two cellists and a bag of lemon drops. The cactus then, as it bagged my order, suddenly became an old woman and one that was so stout and like twenty stacked teacakes that I knew in an instant that before me was Olgus. My mind rushed to exclaim to Olgus that did she realize that she had just been a cactus, but alas it was the turn of my mouth to take charge and it charged me with a self-felony of loss of wit. My own mouth! It began to yell all sorts of slander right back round in the direction of myself. Look at your two lips and how they sit low below your eyes and picture them turning – it was like a pair of hounds you’ve known since birth taking for your calves! I was so upset and betrayed by the sensory rebellion on all levels, for my ears had allowed such vile words to be said through them, that I grabbed both with the hand I still felt some reason of control over and pulled so hard that if they were a stocking they would now be two.

Here is when the Oxford spelling of bizarre was redone to have two more z’s, for I penned a letter later that day with just the demand, but that is another story for another time. Olgus, the cheek she was, had not only been a cactus the whole time, but had been the floor tiles under me, the knob on the door I’d walked through, and she’d found her way into the ends of my eyelashes so that when I blinked the last thing I saw was forty faces of the exact same old lady, pushing out that dough of a grin. Heavens! I thought, this won’t do, for I didn’t know which Olgus to give my two dimes and a copper to and a couple of them might even be fraudulent Olguses, that is Frolguses. I asked all the Olguses to please put their smiles away for one moment so that I could think, but then the Director of Cheeses walked through the front entrance with a sweet dingle of the doorbell and put them all under arrest for undocumented facial cloning. This calmed me a bit and I asked the Directory of Cheeses to lunch tomorrow but here I’m not sure I can say anything more, for the next thing I new I woke up in bed with a reasonable swell on my right temple and a box of lemon drops by my pillow. Ah, and what sweet cello music, coming through my open window!