A lone picketer marched with her sign in front of The Stuttering Ellipsis Pub and Bookstore.
Don Could poured a pint of his Knight Porter for Tawny Johnson. He was going to warn her that he wasn’t particularly happy with this batch, one of the beers he brewed himself in the back of the pub, but anything he might have said was distracted by Constance Ellen Seelterbee chanting “ Pistachios are fascist in the shell, tell this pub to go to hell!”
Tawny sipped the porter before Don Could could say anything, and she smiled, so he just let it go.
After the sip and the smile, Tawny said “It’s amazing you don’t have a restraining order against her already.”
Don, whose face was so stoic that every pigeon who saw him was tempted to perch on it, allowed a tiny little bend at the sides of each lip.
Tawny shelled a few pistachios, popped them in her mouth, chewed.
Don relaxed a bit. She’d never be able to tell the porter had the dreaded buttery aftertaste.
“Constance is annoying but harmless,” Don said.
“Burn this abomination to the ground!” Constance screamed
“Really annoying, and mostly harmless,” Don corrected.
Don Could was born Donald Alfred Might to parents addicted to over-the-counter inhalants and placed in foster care.
His foster family had the grand plan to raise an entire team of synchronized swimmers, and they were marginally successful at it, having performed at the opening of the Flint Municipal Aquatic Center and the grand opening of a recycling facility in an above-ground pool where all the crowd of approximately fourteen could see was frantic little foster legs splashing and gyrating.
While one might think that an activity that involved nose plugs was the perfect milieu for the de facto orphan of huffers, Don loathed it and ran away.
He made it as far as a petting zoo in Kentucky, where he mucked stalls and sold runny slushies and helped a trotting horse give birth to a foal.
Thinking the name “Might” was rather noncommittal, at 19 Don decided to legally change it. He briefly considered Don Will, but not only was that two first names, he didn’t want to be accused of being related to journalist George Will, who on top of being conservative, was a baseball fan and Don hated both conservatives and baseball.
So Don Might became Don Could.
The petting zoo went under owing Don three weeks of paychecks, and they couldn’t afford to feed another animal, so his severance check was the pony he helped bring into the world.
After three days of the pony being tethered to a pole next to the dumpster behind the Regal Hourly Motel , featuring 997 Fingers Massage,the last three fingers are extra! Don went about selling the pony.
“Two, four, six, nine, labor for nuts is a hate crime!”
Constance’s crusade against The Stuttering Ellipsis had lasted over two months.
The pub offered free pistachios to their drinking patrons. According to the interview Constance gave to the Perkinsburg Star Ledger Tribune Courier- which was really just a guy named Chuck with a police scanner, a dictaphone, and an uncle who ran a print shop– giving out nuts that had to be shelled was in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
“Seen Sally lately?” Tawny asked.
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