“PSST! HEY, FRIEND! Yeah, you with the green scales! Buy me!”
I was browsing one of the myriad jumble sales that beck-oned to me, not in the Bazaar, where the voice was probably that of the innocent-looking Deveel vendor behind the table, but on market day in the town square, in a dimension called Ittschalk. I’d stopped off on a tour of the provinces just for the hell of it, where the people were covered by masses of long, wavy hair like Rastafarians and the wide-open skies were greenish.
For the first time in years I wasn’t dependent on anyone else for a ride to the next dimension—thanks to a gift from a friend. I was enjoying the novelty of being able to travel in my own company, staying as long as I pleased, where I pleased. If I felt like having a weeklong drunk in Pookipsie with the Pookas, I could do it. If I discovered the annual Broaching of the Casks festival in Harv was a bust, I could book out of there without having to wait around for a magician to give me a boost. lib-erty was more of a kick than any champagne I’d ever drunk.
The Prounvip Annual Village Fair was a forest of tents set up in a wide-open square, amid the few scattered buildings on the dusty prairie plain. An oom-pa-pa band was tuning up un-der a conical, blue tent in the middle of the clearing. The sa-vory smell of frying sausages and bubbling pots of spicy chili drew my nose’s attention to the stringy-haired cooks laboring over pit stoves under an adjacent pavilion. Kids were having their long locks plaited into tiny dreads and tipped off with colored beads by nimble-fingered hairdressers, or sprayed in undulating patterns with glitter that their mothers were un-doubtedly hoping would wash out easily later on.
