Free KATACLYSM: A Space-Time Comedy by Roy S. Rikman Page A

name was Flower…how unusual.  It’s quite beautiful,” said Jude as he sat down.
    “Thanks.  My parents were a bit eccentric.  My father liked the name Lilly for a girl but my mother was dead set against it.  She wanted to call me Rose.  Flower was a compromise.”
    “Eccentric parents, eh?” said Jude.  “As it happens, I know a couple myself.”
    The waiter rushed out of the kitchen and set down two sizzling orders of fish and chips nestled in the customary checkered wax paper lined baskets.  He left them alone.
    “So, what do you do for a living?” asked Flower as she tried to coax some thick bottled tartar sauce into her basket.
    “Do you own any cats?” said Jude with an expression that suggested this was a perfectly normal answer to her question.
    “Why do you ask?” replied Flower unfazed.
    “Just curious.”
    “I don’t have any pets,” she said leaning forward.
    “I’m a cat massage therapist.”
    She looked at him and blinked several times as though someone had just shone a bright light in her eyes.
    “I can’t say I hear that a lot.”
    “Yes, well I enjoy the element of surprise.  But enough about me, tell me about you.  Why is it that someone as delightful and pretty as you is sitting in a pub looking sullen on such a beautiful day?”
    Flower eyed him carefully as she popped a French fry into her mouth trying to figure out what she felt like telling him.
    “I’ve had a rather strange morning,” she said reaching for the vinegar.
    “Huh,” Jude snorted in agreement, “tell me about it.”
    “So, the thing is Jude, I’ve done something silly.  I don’t know why I’m telling you this but I’ve been visiting a psychic.”  She held her hand up.  “It’s not the kind of thing I would normally do but, you know, a girl gets bored.  Anyway, she’s given me some news that’s quite bizarre.  Normally, I wouldn’t give it a second thought…but it’s just that she’s always so bang on about everything.”  Flower smiled at Jude.  He was so disarming that she was actually surprised to find herself feeling a bit better.
    Jude waited for her to continue.  When nothing was forthcoming he reached out and touched her hand.
    “Come on, I could use a good laugh.  What did the psychic tell you?”
    Flower eyed him again, this time for twice as long as the last.  She bit her lip.
    “Oh hell, it’s not like you’re the Political Editor for the Boston Globe, is it?” she said with a little giggle.
    Jude smiled a puzzled smile but decided to let her continue.
    Albert Avery, the chief of internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, stomped and breathed his way into the small home in Beacon Hill.  Like all doctors who work in teaching hospitals, Avery was used to grilling his students on the widest spectrum of signs and symptoms of disease.  One such symptom was Cheyne-Stokes breathing.  Most commonly, this refers to a sleeping person who spends some of his or her time not breathing at all and the rest of the time trying desperately to catch up with a series of fast, labored breaths.  Dr. Avery was a bit atypical.  He had Cheyne-Stokes breathing while he was awake and, on the occasion that his body said ‘what the heck, let’s go for a few breaths’, the sound was not wholly unlike that of an old jalopy backfiring into a megaphone.  He was a sickly looking man with a stomach that protruded to the extent that it looked as though he had stuffed a small basketball under his dress shirt.  One day, while he was invigilating a clinical examination, a young resident had actually made the mistake of beginning to examine Avery when she entered the room rather than the patient on the examination table.
    Avery was a strange man to be sure, but perhaps nothing about him was as unusual as his take on the autopsy.  Now, most doctors agree that autopsies are an invaluable tool for understanding disease and for determining why medical errors occur.   Autopsies help