found drama

The truck travels from town to town. On the in-town boulevards, the truck creeps along, but you feel certain that it blasts along the highways at incredible speeds. It shifts its shape with each glance. A tractor trailer one moment, a box truck the next, then a van. When it comes to rest on your street, it seems to melt sideways until it has re-formed and then blossomed into a food truck. Open at the side, a bar reaches out and grabs purchase on the curb. Stools sprout from the concrete. (The bartender-cum-driver could have stepped off the set of Deadwood.) He (she?) polishes glasses with a white cloth. Each glass is larger and more preposterously shaped than the last. Behind the bartender are rows and rows of tiny drawers. Like card catalog or apothecary cabinet. The bartender takes your temperature, reads your palm, smells your hair. She (he?) reaches into a dozen of the little drawers and with drawers two dozen different ingredients. Shaves of this. Grated bits of that. Squeeze. Twist. Peel. Mash. Macerate. Muddle. Mixed into increasingly larger glasses. Layers of colors (blood red at the top over orange over a golden yellow over a purple sediment). And finally a mushroom with a cap the size of a dinner plate is floated on top for garnish. “Enjoy.”

About Rob Friesel