Consonantal Drift (FDoFD #3)

There were too many Kjetils in the town where Kjetil grew up – a town called Essence – so when he came of age, he changed his name. He would still be called by the same sound, as his blesséd but overly strict mama demanded of him – but it would now be spelled K-j-t-l.

Yes, in Essence, he would have his new name cake and eat it too.

“I just had one hell of a vowel movement,” Kjtl shouted the instant his application was stamped “APPROVED!”

The line was a keeper, and he racked his brain for a way to remember it, knowing he would use it over and over in the days and weeks and months and years and decades to come, each time pretending he had just thought of it. But solutions proved evasive.

Finally, before leaving the courthouse, which doubled, in Essence, as a fertility clinic, Kjtl put his foot up on some apparatchik’s assistant’s desk, removed his shoelace and tied it around his wedding-ring finger. He then snatched a leaflet about fatherhood supplements to use as scratch paper upon which he wrote with urgency: “Remember to look at your finger!”

The assistant magistrate, whose door was open, glared at him from behind her desk with a raised eyebrow, which, owing to a botched Botox procedure, required her to raise it using several fingers.

Kjtl thrilled at her mild disdain. It had always pleased him to chew on the fingernails of the hand of the long arm of the law.

He vowed right then and there to . . .

— — —
The best place you can ever be is HERE and NOW.
The only place you can ever be is HERE and NOW.
There is no Point B!