vanilla ice cream

today, opposite the ethiopian souk, in the big dusty lot cordoned off by iron bars where people sit drinking chai and jebana and karakaday and vitamin d, there was a man selling ice cream. an ice cream man.

his cart was made of wood, which was painted bright, though it wasn't very bright anymore because in sudan, the sun is jealous of things that might try to out-bright it and goes about fading them while making its own over-the-top brightness known day in and day out.

the man had one type of ice cream. i think it was vanilla. that's only a guess. but it's an educated guess because vanilla is the sort of inoffensive ice cream staple that an ice cream man selling only one flavor would likely have on offer. and, also, from what i could see under the sheer blue piece of plastic that was supposed to protect the ice cream from the jealous sun and not-so-good-tasting dirt, the ice cream was off-white. the color of vanilla ice cream.

i didn't have any ice cream, but if i had, it would have come in a colored ice cream cone -- you know, the sort that taste and look vaguely of styrofoam and come in pale blue and green and also pink and beige? i know this to be true because i saw these very cones all jumbled together in the cart's ice-cream-cone alcove.

this ice cream cart didn't have a speaker playing some electronic melody, like the sort you get on the streets of america. this was a low-tech operation. but the ice cream man did have a wooden flute, which he played well. so well, that i had to fight from being pulled into a zombie-like trance, which, we can safely assume, would have lifted only after i'd asked the man for a scoop of vanilla ice cream in a pale-green cone.

i imagine the cone would have been pale green because the ice cream man seemed like the sort of ice cream man that makes it a point to give his customers a choice of the color cone they'd like if not the flavor of ice cream they'd like, and i would have chosen green because that's the color of my eyes, and somehow it would have seemed appropriate.

had all that happened, though, the ice cream probably would have melted before i was i done licking it into nothing, and little, creamy, vanilla drips would have slipped from the tip of the cone onto my shirt or, if i were particularly lucky, the ground. that's what always happens when the sun tries to eat your ice cream before you do.