Jasmine didn’t like Rune. Well, she did like Rune. But he always complained. Like now, he said his cuppa Joe was not hot and his piece of pie was poor.
‘Poor pie?’
‘Too much beet sugar.’
Like Rune ought to remember with rhubarb pie you had to add serious sweet or it would tart your teeth, like his grandma Stubager told him last time in Elk Horn.
‘My shake’s just right, thick as tar and straw-bear-ee.’
If Rune only had Jasmine’s positive attitude, he would like his cold coffee and his piss-poor pie.
‘Put my pie in that shake, make a pie shake. A strawberry-rhubarb pie shake. They do pie shakes here, at the Hamburg,’ says Rune.
‘You’ve never ordered a pie shake.’
‘Could though. Coulda-shoulda-woulda,’ says Rune.
Really all Rune wanted was to put together pieces of the pathetic puzzle left on their table top.
‘See the nose missing? The Hound of the Baskervilles’s nose must be some schnoz. It’s loose, lost. What’s missing, everything’s missing,’ says Rune.
Rune doesn’t like anything, Jasmine’s never going out with him again.
‘I give. I’m going. I don’t get you,’ says Jasmine.
‘Shaka-shaka-shake. Shake, don’t bake, shake a strawberry-rhubarb pie. Shake.’
Mike Lewis-Beck writes in Iowa City. He has pieces in Alexandria Quarterly, American Journal of Poetry, Apalachee Review, Chariton Review, Cortland Review, and Pure Slush, among other venues. Recently, he published a book of poems, Rural Routes.
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