After Frederick

I had a dream that something big would happen after Frederick, though I knew not what. I know, I know: the formality of the phrase I knew not what might make it seem as though I wasn’t juggling at the time, but I was. I was juggling. Check this shit out, I said, to each person who entered the rumpus room. Simon, Alice, Moonshot, Fennel Seed, Dougie. They all came in, one b’one. I was juggling eggs. I’d hard-boiled them, which is a form of cheating in juggling circles. Hard-boiling goes against the jugglers’ code, you see. There is a whole section in the jugglers’ code on eggs. The version of the jugglers’ code I own is a handsome hardback edition. The pages are heavy and gilt-edged: real swanky. You can slice your finger like a mother on one of those bastards if you’re not careful. The code is very clear in re eggs: no hard-boiling eggs before juggling them. Hard-boiling lowers the stakes. Where is the danger if not from sticky innards? But I couldn’t afford to take risks with my eggs, not tonight, not with Shari Longfellow on the guest list.

As long as I didn’t drop any of the eggs, no one would be the wiser. You can’t tell an egg’s been hard-boiled from the outside. You have to hold it in your hand. You have to see it fall.