I drove straight from the museum to this grocery store parking lot
which holds the reconditioned garden shed known in summer
months as the Snow Shack. How has it come to this, always ordering
a small Tiger’s Blood snow cone at every counter I’ve ever crawled
up to? I wouldn’t be kidding if I said that once I ate the paper cup after
and called myself a big-game hunter using my crimson tongue, though
everyone could tell it wasn’t going to be so. That was back home:
different times, different ice, served with a sacred spoon straw you don’t
see much anymore. Could these really be mine eyes, the ones who’ve
seen the glory? The only snow cone man I’ve known well we all called
Doctor. He taught physics and let us shoot rockets off at the fifty yard
line. But at the fair and elsewhere, he could have purchased or pre-mixed
the Tiger’s Blood flavor but didn’t. Instead he spilled them each out with
his back turned away from the counter to keep the secret his, and that has
made all the difference. Now I’m looking at Mural on my phone and pinching
closer and closer to the canvas with syrupy fingers, blinking rapidly. This is
the way they should present it over at the museum: in ever-hot July, snow
cone in hand. Only now are the hidden away rabbits beginning to scatter
across the canvas. I’m trying not to think about that movie and Ed Harris and
ash falling off of his prop cigarette onto all that costly paint, but I am and it’s
a shame because I want to imagine that the culprit wasn’t high doses of liquor
and ego that finally pushed him over the edge on the way to Mural. Instead it
was a lifetime of Tiger’s Blood diluted into many, many cups of ice like this. If
only Doctor had shown me just once what it was he layered into the cup. All I
taste anymore is echoes, paint that will never dry on a sagging linen canvas. That
must be that paper cup talking: I’ve waited so long for something as much as a
snarl to hit my lips that I can thank all this Tiger’s Blood for.

Avery Gregurich is a writer living and working in Marengo, Iowa. He was raised next to the Mississippi River and has never strayed too far from it. More of his work can be found here.