Corona in the City

Frog legs are one of the most fascinating yet incomprehensibly enigmatic inventions of the nature
there are.

Bernardt Jacopsen, the 47th Nobel prize winner looks at the golden Alfred crammed between his
collection of stones from Tahiti and a sugar bowl containing the ashes of his loyal labrador retriever.
“For the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three
families of quarks in nature.”
He worked on this research for 11 years, he’s been baffled by the frog legs for 52.

He often found himself analysing them profoundly at the only restaurant in his part of town that
served frog legs without mistaking them for chicken wings sold at a closeby supermarket. The place
was called Chez Antoine. Its owner was a middle-aged Japanese man whose moustache was
unmistakably just like Antoine’s – a deliberate decision to make one stop wondering about the hidden
meaning of this cultural enigma of a place if not life itself.

Which creature resembles a skinned gym rat,
evoking disgust in some
yet adoration in others?
Asked the Sphynx Oedipus

In such moments of head-spinning confusion, Bernardt’s focus point developed the size and shape of
his quarks making him lose a sense of time and space altogether. After going into a state similar to
hibernation, staring at his untouched plate for hours without so much as a twitch, somebody usually
called him a cab.

A few days later on one of his evening walks, Bernardt noticed his Nobel-prize portrait hanging on the
wall next to the entrance of Chez Antoine, underneath which there was an inscription saying:
“Forbidden to enter under any circumstances.”

“C’est la fin des haricots”(1) Antoine would mutter at him, drag his duvet from underneath the bar and
turn off the lights.

–

(1)
that’s the end of it

My stories are a collection of aphorisms, anecdotes and short adventures inspired and written by the idleness of quarantine. They’re observations of a seemingly unchanging environment that hides many stories, revealed only when observed closely.

by Nezzie K.