Boomsticks.

This is one of my fairly recent... well, I suppose you could call it a short story. Or maybe you couldn't. I don't know. Anyway, enjoy.

Although my watch had stopped working about four days ago, I guessed by the position of the sun that it was probably around five in the afternoon. This meant of course that it could have been anywhere from noon to midnight, but I took comfort in the knowledge nonetheless. As my companion and I walked along the old dirt road we came upon a moderately well-sized wooden cart that looked like it had seen better days, but was having trouble remembering exactly when they had been, or for that matter what a better day might have looked like. At the front of the cart was a mule, healthy and strong in defiance of his surroundings, idly chewing a mouthful of dry grass and pointedly ignoring us with the air of one who does not deign to gaze upon those inferior to itself.
The sign atop the cart proclaimed the owner to be a purveyor of Fyne Qualitie BoomStickes, though my companion and I were at a loss as to what a boom stick actually was. As it turned out, a purveyor of boomsticks looks much like an old farmer might if he had spent his life lighting fires in close proximity to methane deposits, and was accordingly missing several fingers from his right hand.
The old man's brittle, shoulder-length white hair was singed in places, and his straw hat boasted a large hole in the brim just above his right eye, ringed with a dark scorch mark. I began to wonder if perhaps a boomstick was some kind of firework, and if, perhaps, someone had set one off directly under the man's hat. The rest of his clothing was equal parts scorched and burned, and I guessed that hit shirt might have been yellow at some point, but it now ranged from black to a dingy brown. All of this I saw from over the counter of his cart, which, now that I thought about it looked to have been set on fire several times during its weary lifetime.
"Excuse me," I said to the man, who, sitting on a rickety looking chair near the rear of his cart had, much like the mule, pointedly ignored our presence until now, "but what exactly is it that you're selling here?"
Lifting his head and tilting it slightly to the left, he fixed his right eye on me sharply, illuminated now by the hole in his hat, and said simply, "Kent ya reed, boy?"
"Well, yes," I said, somewhat apologetically, "but my friend and I were wondering--" I broke off, searching for some more tactful way to put it and finding none, "That is, we wanted to know just what a boomstick is."
"Ahh," he said, lifting himself slowly from the chair, his hands on his knees providing most of the support, in that purposeful way that old, tired men are wont to do, "then ye've come to the right place, for here ye'll find the finest quality boomsticks anywhere, and that's a fact."