142 - Not Funny, Oh God

Dear Ten, most especially Mikas, my most professional of Gods… might I make a humble request?  Please do not take it a challenge when I said out loud that my father had the wildest happenings of the restaurant business and surely nothing that crazy would happen to us.

I’m sitting on the wreckage of my terrace, looking down at the workmen clearing up the bricks in the street.  The current Spark of the Sun’s Ray just had to bring his biggest pet… or at least borrowed from Mil Torii Itzan… and get her stinking drunk on a barrel of one of my best liquors. Not a Rho, thank the Ten, but still, it was an entire cask of Silken Gloves!

She’d been perfectly calm and polite until then.  Then she’d uprooted and eaten all my potted hedge plants, including an herb tree that our Smokemaster had planted! Of course things got even crazier then. I was offering her baskets of lettuces and she decided that hurling them like missiles at the crowd was funny.

I’d shut the wine safe to keep her from reaching in through the open front windows and going for more booze, so she went around to from my Fig to the Gourmand and started randomly grabbing from the storage stack of casks on the roof.

There’s little enough rain that roof storage around here is usually perfectly acceptable, in fact you almost have to use your roof for storage if you only have tiny basements and want to use every open space on the main for customers.

You know, I’ve never seen a mammoka pull a face before. That was when she hit the vinegars and spat a half dozen out, hurling them behind her like an Aitza finding a maggot in her kaf.  Got a small cask of cooking red, which was still all right, though the Heir tried to get her to stop and she grabbed her mahu’s goad and whacked him with it. Apparently you don’t get between a mammoka and her booze.

Then things really and truly went into the garderobe hole. For Lakan dishes, and people who’d gotten a taste for spicy hot, they’d imported a small cask of red-pepper oil.  Fluffy put it in her mouth and bit it open.  She’d frozen, with her ears outspread, her tail straight up, knees trembling, her eyes wide open as a virgin on their first night.

The noise she made blew the dust off the entire street, blasting the banners out and, with red oil drooling down her front, making her look like a carnivore, she bashed her head into the Gourmand, cracking the front window and wheeled around.

That was when her butt hit the Exchequer, the first time. She must have hit that wall a ten of times. Thank the Ten she decided the building was the cause of her mouth being on fire. When the bricks started to come down and break and the mortar dust hid most of what was going on, I quit staring.

Helfwig had gotten the kids into the cellar and our customers out… even getting half of them to pay their bills before they fled! What a woman.

Then she joined me, outside, in case she needed to haul my own precious pink butt out of trouble, as she has so many times before.

The screaming was going off down the street toward the Main Gate, thank the Ten. The Heir and the mahu must have gotten her moving to run off the fire in her mouth and throat.  I could imagine she must have felt a bit like her mouth were being sacked and destroyed.

“I hope he knows to give her milk, beer, and salt,” Helfwig said, quietly, as the dust settled.

“Um. I’ll just make up a list of damages,” I said. “Shall I?”

“I’ll get the kids up again,” she said.  “Kafiris is already rallying people to clean up the mess.”

“We’ll have a shorted dinner menu,” Dorn said, panting up from his own cellar.  “But we’ll not let a little thing like a cracked window get in our way.”

I repeat, oh my professional God, please don’t take what falls out of my mouth as a challenge, hmmm?  I will try and put a lock on my lips but you know me, Great One, always shooting my mouth off.  Not funny, really, Honoured Mikas though I can see You laughing Your divine head off. So will I, one day, but I really don't need any more 'funny stories' like this.

“That’s what Da would have said.”  I started to laugh.  “Let’s throw a Mammoka Disaster sale!”