Richard stopped in the middle of Lowther Street, captivated in the worst of ways by one of the overly cheerful shop windows. Surrounded by glittering tinsel and papier-mâché figures dyed in a rainbow of colors were, undeniably, several dozen engravings of him.
There was Round the World by the Waist, which depicted the scales of justice with himself on one side, heavier than the globe itself. Then, there was Captain Hyatt’s Global Expansion, which showed a gaggle of locals from what he assumed were the Italian countryside, given the pastoral attire, all lined up to deposit Mediterranean fruits in the titular character’s gaping mouth.
He worked his fingers into his neck, which had developed a sudden ache. Under his breath, he lamented, “I should not have named the character after myself.”
He had been twenty and stupid, thinking that Mr. Richard Hyatt’s quasi-autobiographical Captain Hyatt series of adventure novels would never amount to more than simple amusements for children. Ten years and more than a dozen publications later, he was staring at his own caricatures in a bloody toy shop. Indeed, children and adults alike were greatly amused by a portly sea captain traveling to exotic lands.
The general public had no idea that the real man and the fictional man were different people, never mind the fact that Richard wasn’t even a captain, nor that the fictional caption was not round about the middle. Apparently, the differences were stark only to Richard himself.
Possessed by sharp determination, he wrenched open the toy shop door and made his way through the tight aisles, careful not to knock over any wooden dolls or bang a hip against a rocking horse. When he arrived at the counter, he said, “I’d like all of the engravings in the window and any more that you have in stock.”
The young man behind the counter blinked at him, cordial mask shocked right off him at the sound of such a ridiculous request. “Sir?”
Richard glanced from the offending window to the shop worker. “Did I not annunciate?”
“You did, sir,” the man said slowly, trying to work out just what was happening on this no-longer-typical afternoon. “If you don’t mind waiting—”
While he waited, Richard strode over to the window and took one of the engravings: The Great Beast and the Bear. The comedy was, it seemed, that one was unable to guess which was the beast and which was the bear: the rotund Captain Hyatt or the actual grizzly bear who were locked in fisticuffs.
Wrestling a bear. Honestly.
