Squished

Portuguese words sound squished...

I squished one.

She squished a cockroach.

Sami squished the mosquito.

He squished the spider and flushed him down the toilet.

He squished the spider.

Mennad squished the centipede.

Tom squished the cockroach with his foot.

Yanni squished the poor June beetle.

After midnight on the 13th of March of 2022, I cooked a soup snack of instant noodles with pieces of cabbage, asparagus, and dried anchovies which my brother gave me for my birthday some weeks ago. I drank coffee. I prepared my books for a review of my Brazilian Carioca accent in Portuguese and of Russian phonology. When I heard from afar people speaking either of these two languages, I often mistook it for the other. These languages were funny in the way the vowels "squished" or "bloated" like rubber, depending if they were unstressed or stressed. Afterwards, I ate chocolate-laced Italian biscotti. In the drizzling morning after 10 o'clock, I walked to the pizzeria. On the way, on the other side of the main road, running in the opposite direction, was a little stocky boy with dark hair. At the pizzeria, I ate two slices and drank a diet black cola. A couple of city punks with a skateboard visited the Lulu Island suburban pizza parlour. A basketball game was in progress on the big screen, with the sound off. At home, I practiced my Brazilian Carioca accent, as I read aloud the novel Os filhos de Matusalem, or Methuselah's Children, by Robert Heinlein.