WORLD VOICES

CORONOLOGY
  BY CLAIRE BATEMAN

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Coronology

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J   When the boy with the jailbreak crown moves into the neighborhood, all the girls with pastry crowns find him irresistible because each is confident that the key in the center of her particular pastry matches the lock in the little steel door in his crown. From behind this door, there's the sound of something that needs to be set free. To one girl, it sounds like a flock of meadow larks, all beating their wings at the same time. To another, it sounds like the engine of a rebuilt 1977 Harley FXS Low Rider. Whatever it is, it's clearly larger than the brassy cage that confines it. That's why so many girls have sacrificed, in vain, their one-and-only key. Even the girl with the cupcake crown was unsuccessful, though inside her dozen cupcakes she had twelve keys which fitted pin-tumbler locks, push-key padlocks, locks with revolving cylinders, quadruply-wanded locks, spring-latch locks, lever locks, rim locks, Sphinx locks, Tibetan locks, chastity locks, the final lock of the Sacred Brotherhood of the Order of Freemasonry, and the infamous White Gold Lock of New Delhi. It's gotten so that he pulls down the shades and refuses to answer the door whenever he sees a pastry girl coming up the sidewalk. He did perk up a little at the visit of the girl with the rum flambé crown and a key too hot to touch, but when they extracted the key with tongs, it turned out to be as useless as all others. O, that rumbling from inside his crown! O, those ravaged cakes!