Description
Excerpt From the Title Story
Zigfrīds Imants Lenc did not have a name on his home planet, because names were superfluous, but in Lummings, Alabama, where he operated the Latvian restaurant opposite the abortion clinic, his regulars called him Red Ziggy. The “Red” did not refer to the young man’s politics. Customers at Café Riga found the eatery’s proprietor zealously neutral in political matters, as impervious to provocation as the mimes at the Twelve Oaks Mall. Newcomers often speculated that his colorful nickname arose from the young man’s perpetually blush-slapped cheeks: a plausible, yet inaccurate guess. Rather, Ziggy had purchased the eatery from an old-timer known as Red Wally, who’d once made headlines for refusing Rosa Parks a soft drink. Ziggy replaced his predecessor’s ham hocks and black-eyed peas with pickled mushrooms and black balzam; the food critic at the Press Sentinel plucked the “Red” off Wally and pinned it onto Zigfrīds. But the review itself had been generous. Café Riga could claim to be the only Latvian restaurant in metropolitan Birmingham-the only Latvian restaurant in the entire state, in fact-which explained Red Ziggy’s placement. If the proprietor knew little about Baltic cuisine, his clientele knew even less, so mistakes were unlikely to attract attention. This low profile suited his mission: to observe the outlying planet’s inhabitants. Unfortunately, Dr. Schnabel opened his clinic six weeks after Red Ziggy baked his first pīrāgi, drawing competing demonstrators and the national media to Lummings; four months later, Erin Gwench of Saint Agatha’s College in Creve Coeur, Rhode Island, came to torment his soul…
