TE16 Turkish Delight

A Long-Awaited Arrival better if he sat down for awhile. He coughed, with his hand on his chest, and said: “The journey was quite tiring. And the humidity here, it’s worse than I expected.” The apple guys yelled at me fromafar: “The third wagon asked for you, beard-face… Do you have fresh stories?” I gathered my stuff and hastily walked towards them. I tried to maneuver fast to pass the boys selling water, screaming as they did it, but I hit their carboy and my shirt got wet. Thankfully no harm was done to the copies of the story I was carrying. I ran to the third wagon—I didn’t want to mess up my chances, if I’d had any, with any client that night. The guest Jew had already taken up part of my shift, but you don’t leave a guest unattended in that chaos. I wondered how long he was going to stay. We’d definitely have another beef with the chief if he insisted on taking the young Jew’s corpse. We almost couldn’t bury him, you know. Fortunately, Article 248 helped us find a tomb at a corner of the cemetery, but boy we had to work at it… On top of that we had to listen to the chief scold us, for days. The third wagon was the couchette car. To be frank I didn’t know how to sell my panther claw story, which I’d barely finished by dawn, to a passenger travelling in the couchette compartment. For starters, maybe they wouldn’t fancy the use of language; but maybe they would find its circus setting interesting. Touches like that were my way of being on the edge, or trying to be, so that I could sell my stories. “Hey story guy!” A bald man with huge glasses covering half of his face was shouting at me from his

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