You order a coffee and monster cupcake in the cafe of a North Shore bookstore. On the wall, a mural of Hemingway looks down on you. As you’re about to bite into the cake’s half inch of frosting, you sense the old writer float down. He pulls out a chair and joins you.
Hey, if imagination can’t run a little wild in a book shop, well, where can it? He gets right to the point…
“When we were fighting in the mud and the cold during the war, that cupcake could’ve kept freezing men, nurses and ambulance drivers alive for a week.”
You answer, in mid-bite, that he’s losing his touch, since he’s known for truth, not exaggeration.
He replies, “I’m just a figment of your guilt, you glutton. I can exaggerate all I want. Now, are you going to eat that or are you going to remove it before bells start tolling for your diet?”
The guy’s getting bellicose, so you say, earnestly: “I’ll remove it from my plate, from my morning, from my diet. It will become…”
He stops you with a sly grin on his weathered face and says with the pride of a phrase-maker, “…a removable feast,”
With that, he fades away. He’s back on the wall now, staring down as before. But there’s a smug look on that mug.
You dump the 500-calorie cupcake and leave the cafe area. But you don’t leave the store. You drift upstairs to the fiction section and page through a collection of Hemingway’s short stories. Although you feel, on a different level, you were in one.