The Convalescent by Jessica Anthony Page B

diarrhée
.
    That means “the diarrhea.”
    Come evening, after the meat customers have left and the gray spring sky has gone grayer, I’m rolling up the awning when a large black sport utility vehicle drives past. It moves slowly at first, and then speeds up, disappearing around the bend. Sometimes cars will drive by the meat bus like this. The drivers want to see what a human being is doing out here with a broken-down bus and a fridge full of meat. They always want me to be doing something interesting, but when they see that all the hairy little Hungarian does is sit in his green plastic lawnchair, leisurely enjoying the scents that float across the field, stroking an exceptionally long blade of grass with one finger, just waiting for meat customers, they become impatient. Sometimes they shout, “Do something!” or “Do a trick, midget!”
    So now when Virginians drive by the field, I stay seated in my lawn-chair. I remain so still that I’ve started practicing not moving at all. Not even blinking. Sometimes I get so absorbed in not-blinking that I don’t even notice when a customer comes up to the bus. Not even when they stand right in front of me, waving a hand in my face, which is what a female Virginian of a tall, gangly variety happens to be doing right now.
    “Hey, are you still open?” she asks.
    She pokes me with the tip of her shoe.
    I go inside to wrap up the woman’s steaks, but it turns out that I do not move fast enough for her.
    “Come on, come on,” she says.
    I hand her the meat from a window.
    “You’ve got terrible service,” she sneers, and sprints across the field. She jumps in her car and roars off. As she goes, she passes the same black sport utility vehicle returning to the field. But this time it doesn’t just drive by the meat bus; it expertly backs up around the bend and comes to a shuddering stop at the side of the road. The doors swing open and three men hop out. They’re all wearing clean-pressed black suits, and they all possess these strong, remarkable chins. They remind me immediately of FBI agents I’d seen on a television program at Dr. Monica’s office, but these are not FBI agents. One holds a fresh white letter in his hands, while the others remove a wide sign attached to a stake from the backseat:
PROPERTY OF SUBDIVISIONS LLC
    The Subdivisionists look both ways, walk to the edge of my field, and then, with a rubberized mallet, wordlessly pound the stake into the ground.

X
EVOLUTION OF THE PFLIEGMANS:
THE PECHENEGS ADVANCE
     
    It is not always easy for people to move from one region of the world to another and make a fresh go of it. It is not always sufficient to live in an unpopulated field, or even an entire unpopulated freshwater basin, and call it your own. Sometimes a person must possess certain things that declare ownership. Pieces of paper, et cetera.
    Possessing pieces of paper, it seems, is extremely important to people.
    Five years after Aranka’s river redefined the quixotic geography of the Carpathian Basin, the Western Europeans were not at all pleased that these nomads from the East had acquired so much land so quickly. And so close to an actual
place
. They began spreading rumors, horrific rumors, as though the Hungarians were as bad as the Turks, the Huns, the Saracens, or even the Pechenegs, calling them, incredulously, “Child-Devouring Cannibals,” or the “Bloodthirsty, Man-Eating Monsters from Scythia.” To these people devoted to leisure, to vanity.
    To public displays of affection!
    Word traveled back to the Ural Mountains that the grass-lolling Magyars had discovered a river next to the nicest and grassiest of all nice and grassy spots to live, and so, without even finishing their breakfast cereal,the Pechenegs migrated southwestward to once again wipe their filthy paws all over our brand-spanking-new grasses, to kick down the posts of our tents and bust all our clay pots, to thrust the wooden stakes of their flags into our precious