A Regular Tuesday (Prose, part 1/4)

It was just another regular Tuesday, and there was absolutely nothing indicating that this day would at all differ from any chosen previous one I'd had the good fortune of experiencing. In fact I distinctly remember thinking to myself "What a fantastically normal and regular day," as off I went to the Little Shop around the Corner to purchase my daily fresh bread rolls and yesterday's newspaper - which always lay in the same place, absolutely free of charge, if only one knew where to look for it.

I made to cross the road, just as a tiny kitty-cat ran straight across my path, being all black as charcoal from the nostrils of its little nose to the tip of its tail, all the way down to the frantically trotting paws. Now, I really must hurry and say that I am in fact not a very superstitious person – must the sky fall down and the Devil take my soul if ever I spoke a lie – but black cats are an ill omen, however way of putting it!

So I decided that this delightfully normal day was as good a time as any to stray off my regular path to the Little Shop around the Corner, and try another way. Rather than crossing the road I continued down the street a bit, stopping every now and again to have a look into some forgotten neighbour's garden, my mind simply overflowing with exclamations such as "Oh my, those are some fabulous roses right there" and "Mrs. O'Malley certainly must have some time on her hands, creating a lovely garden like this." None as beautiful as my own, of course. Oh, may all sorts of blessings befall my modest soul but is my very on garden the pride of the street, or so I flatter myself thinking.

At the bottom of the street lives Mr. McCarthy, only he moved this summer, to London, apparently. May his unpatriotic old soul never find peace, so that he'll come back to the country that was bought him by young Catholic sweat and blood. No, actually, let him stay where he is, that unappreciative, dreadful old man!

As I looked over the little fence at his overgrown garden – what a shame that his granddaughter (for he certainly did have a granddaughter, didn't he now?) has done nothing to adorn those living things that have shot out of the ground at own will here, and now even the ivy climbing the walls of the house and – Oh look it! – covering the door so that no one might enter lest they have a machete at hand – I couldn't help but notice a collection of empty (I assumed they were so by the way that the sun seemed to shine through them – not that I gave much thought to it, of course) bottles in a first floor window. Oh, he always did love his comfort liquor that old Mr. McCarthy. Surely he has only been away since the summer, which can only be, what, some nine months ago now, on this undeniably regular day in early April.