“To Rex, King of Carnival, we lift our glass in a toast and welcome your royal highness to our fair city. Today, we are truly one people united under your reign. Hail, Rex.”
To think that some wait a lifetime to be crowned King of Carnival, and it’s over so quickly. The blur […]
“My God, Lucien, will you look at the size of that thing?” Olivier DeJoie had never seen an oyster of quite such menacing proportions. “Thing must be big as my fist,” he said, holding his beefy hand up for comparison.
It was no exaggeration. In all his years of running DeJoie’s, the city’s premier fine dining establishment, he could not recall ever having encountered such an impressive specimen.
“Bet you can’t get it all in your mouth,” said Lucien Dautrieve, his trusted chef, sitting beside him at a large round table overflowing with steaming food dishes. Babe Ruth and Diamond Jim Brady - whose outsized appetites had been chronicled in the newspapers of the day - had nothing on Olivier DeJoie.
“Ha. Guess again, Pal,” Olivier said. “You should know me better than that.”
“You care to make a wager on it?”
“God, if you exist, please, when I open up my eyes, let there be a bus coming.”
Resting his forearm across the weathered oak providing a temporary respite from the early summer sun, Web Crawford bowed his head and closed his eyes for one final test of faith. Though not yet 10 a.m., the air inside his wrinkled khakis was already growing moist, soiling his boxers and causing great unrest at the center of his adolescent male universe. Waiting once again for a bus that never seemed to come on time only served to make matters worse.
With equal measures of hope and fear, Web threw open his lids to survey the horizon.
No luck.
“Alright, maybe I wasn’t trying hard enough,” he conceded…
