AcmeShorts

Achmed had just arrived with another bowl of dates -- I landed swift teasing slap across his brown buttocks and sent the boy scuttling back to fetch my luncheon -- when I realized, with a crystalline lucidity that I have known on only a few occasions, that I would never again see London, that here, in this walled garden, in the cooling shadows of this arcade, I would remain; and my soul was flooded with a boundless joy, for I knew then that all of my strivings and hardships were behind me: my existence had been distilled to simplest and most inviolate of pleasures -- evening backgammon matches, watching rivulets of fig juice trickle southward down the heaving slope of my magnificient belly, buggery -- and I knew that history would remember me as a great bicyclist, perhaps the finest of his generation, and that soon Achmed would return (and Makmoud would be with him), bringing mint tea, and spit-roasted lamb, and honeycombed Bagh'ir, and goat's yogurt.