FURIOUSLY IS THE ONLY WAY ONE CAN EVER DRINK TURNIP SOUP: A terrible story to revise.

FURIOUSLY IS THE ONLY WAY ONE CAN EVER DRINK TURNIP SOUP


He was 175cm tall and was wearing a blue jacket, red slacks, white gloves, a white shirt, a black tie with white spots and a hat. He weighted about 200 lbs. He was Scottish. His parents were tremendously wealthy and his mother was descended from a Scottish Queen but had lived in Norway since early childhood. In his wallet, he had a credit card, a driver’s license from Manitoba, and $46—two twenties, one five, three quarters, two dimes and a nickel. Outside the weather was cold. How cold? It was cold enough to freeze the monkeys off a goose. It was snowing and outside large slow flakes swirled about the sky and then gradually slammed onto the ground. It was 2018 and the world was continuing as usual, each of us with our small and petty problems, though some of us with quite big problems and the world itself a mess with war, climate change and many social issues unresolved.

“I’m not feeling happy,” he said. “I’m quite sad. My girlfriend hasn’t phoned me in ages.”

Brinnng! Brrrring! His cellphone buzzed ironically. The sound was off.

“Hello,” he said.

“Hello,” a voice on the other end said.

“Who is this?” he asked timidly.

“It’s your girlfriend,” the voice said, surprised.

“Who?” he questioned.

“Gladys,” she said. 

“Oh. Gladys,” he responded. “My girlfriend?”
“Yes,” Gladys said.

"Oh," he said. "Gladys. Hello."

He asked her where she was. She wouldn’t tell him. “Are you at a party?” he asked. “Maybe with my best friend?” His best friend was called Charlie. Charlie was a research scientist who worked at the university and explored the connection between the use of fossil fuels and the rise in water temperature in the world’s oceans. “It’s bad,” Charlie would say. “I think we’re doomed.”

“Doomed?” he’d ask.

“Yes,” Charlie would say. “I’m a scientist. I know. Also…”
“What, Charlie,” he’d ask.

“I’m in love with your girlfriend,” Charlie said sheepishly.

“Oh,” he replied. “Really?”

“Yes,” Charlie asserted.
“Oh no,” he answered perturbedly. 

Charlie was 5'8" and weighted 175 lbs. He lived in on the third floor of a modestly priced apartment near the river. Sometimes, large boats floated down the river and in the night blew their horn which made a sad sound that made Charlie sad when he thought about his mother and father who had died as well as his brother and his dog, Sniffer. 

But back to the phonecall and the falling snow. His girlfriend Gladys told him she was in Fiji, a small and beautiful island in the South Pacific. She had left everything to be with the flowers. She was a painter and wanted to paint. She liked to paint bright canvasses filled with bright flowers. “Flowers,” she said. “Their delicate petals represent the fragility of the human heart, the contingent experience of being mortal here on this fragile blue marble floating in an infinite unknowable universe the purpose of which we cannot know unless we believe there is a God who guides us, who guides what happens in this infinitude of space, who makes the material as well as the spiritual discernable to us, we poor souls who live on the surface, on the lakes, fields, valley and mountains of this earth. Oh, flowers,” she exclaimed. “I am only in love with you and the fragrant delicate nighttime air of this Fiji. What a wonder it is to be alive. Also, to be far away from Charlie and my boyfriend, also.”

She took a large ladle and helped herself to a large bowl of turnip soup which she drank furiously in view of the ocean and its slapping waves. And also shared with her dog who she loved more than life itself. Then she carefully wiped her mouth with a napkin made of woven treebark and turned to her easel where she was painting a painting of a flower. “Oh, flowers,” 
she said. “I think I will live forever.”

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