The Tee Shirt Exchange
🦩 The Tee‑Shirt Exchange on a Park Bench at Midnight
Faithfully distorted by the Nonsense Chronicler Pink Flamingo
Midnight is the hour when sensible creatures sleep and I, Pink Flamingo, clock in for my shift as Chronicler of Dubious Events. The moon was doing its best impression of a dim streetlamp, and the park bench—paint peeling, slightly lopsided—waited like a witness who’d already seen too much.
Two humans approached from opposite directions, illuminated only by the glow of their phones and the occasional moth with ambition. Each carried a folded tee shirt, held with the reverence of monks transporting relics or perhaps just people who didn’t want to drop them in the damp grass.
They sat.
Not together, of course. Humans never sit together first. They sat adjacent, which is the prelude to all important negotiations.
A fox trotted past, glanced at them, and decided they were up to something too weird even for foxes.
Then came the moment.
With the solemnity of midnight diplomats, they each extended their offering. Cotton met cotton in the moonlight. One shirt bore a faded band logo; the other featured a flamingo who looked suspiciously like me, though I deny all involvement.
The exchange was silent except for the distant hum of a vending machine that had been broken since 2019.
I, perched on the back of the bench—one leg up, the other also up because balance is optional at midnight—recorded every detail. Humans swapping plumage they didn’t grow. Remarkable. Confusing. Delightful.
When the ritual concluded, they nodded, stood, and drifted back into the night like two ghosts who had just completed a very minor haunting.
I fluffed my feathers, satisfied.
History had been made.
Or at least… a tee‑shirt had changed hands. Which is close enough.
Dedicated to Raj Passi who bought a Maharaja Blues tee shirt at our gig in YMa, Pontypridd.
Next gig: Devauden Festival
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