HUNDREDS AND THOUSANDS BY FOUTOUX copyright 2016
The first day of Spring, the sky is blue, the daffodils
bloom. Yellow bells, ding dong, ding
dong. “Wake up its spring”. At the
castle on the hill thousands of daffodils stand guard until a great crowd
arrive to pick them. Juliette, a small
gormless girl in blue runs carelessly through the yellow legions leaving a
flattened path behind her. Buck-toothed
and blonde she is not the child in other fairytales. Not all children are nice. Her mother runs behind her and pulls her up.
In the castle refectory tea is served. Fairy cakes sprinkled with hundreds and
thousands. These aristocrats have to
make their money somehow. Juliette pulls
the hundreds and thousand off piece by piece – a blue splinter here, a pink one
there, here a silver ball made to break children`s teeth. They sit in front of a blazing fire, the head
of a stag looks accusingly at the assembly.
These are the Bored on Sunday visitors but the daffodils have brought
the Cheap on Sunday visitors. Juliette’s
mother notices a few hundreds and thousands stuck around her child’s
mouth. She spits on her handkerchief and
roughly rubs Juliette’s mouth. The spit
is a smell she will remember all her life.
The tea is poured from the finest china and Juliette is
enthralled by the reappearance of the roses as she drinks her tea. It is a shame she is such disagreeable
child. She has eaten two fairy cakes and
thousands and thousands of hundreds and thousands. Mother and child leave clutching the
daffodils which even after an hour have lost their joie-de-vivre. Instead of being blown by the wind and shaded
by the trees they will rest, quite still, in a glass vase on an ugly sideboard.
