Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy by Gary Barwin

Author:Gary Barwin [Barwin, Gary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780735279520
Google: WOUbEAAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0735279527
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2021-03-09T00:00:00+00:00

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You wake and find you have no teeth. It was a night of splendid gnashing and unrecallable gnawing. Who did you bite? And where? Have they slung a leg over, ridden a pony to the next town, your teeth in their haunches? Despite his mouth tasting like a goulash of rats, Motl did have his pearly whites when he woke, but he was not the Karaite he once was, nor with the ability to prove it. What now?

“Frančišek, Frančišek,” he roared. “I am sober now. Without papers, I’m not Karaite but a dead man. Save me and we’ll find you some cash. Or we’ll try your back window and repatriate what we need.”

Esther turned and, half-awake, murmured, “Motl?”

Hard to maintain an illusion of aplomb when one is speaking from the floor.

“Esther,” he said. “I lost something last evening that I must get back.”

“Your dignity?”

“I reckon that was left in the Alps, years ago.”

“Surely you didn’t wager the car?”

“If only they’d thought of it. Or I had.”

He confessed the whole sorry story, and between them they decided they had no choice but to find Frančišek’s farmhouse and retrieve Motl’s papers.

“And,” Motl said, “take a gander…”

“I know,” Esther said. “For the goose.”

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