The Shop of Broken Hopes

Dressed in licorice-colored stockings and boots-high boots, in a uniform of beige icing, leaning on a cane—an umbrella in a red-and-white spiral—and curling up his thick mustache, early in the morning of the last winter month, sneezed outside the window of St. Thomas Hospital not anyone else but Constable Schnapps. Most of all, the constable hated the common cold and pigeon airline lines…