75The Sun Came Up a Doughnut

This one is all the way across town from everything else, and we are including it because the joke is perfect and it is executed completely straight.

On the brick flank of a Shipley Do-Nuts, beside the drive-through window, is a proper landscape: a sunrise in soft blended bands — gold, then peach, then coral, then dusty rose, then lavender, then a deep cobalt at the water. Five or six ranges of scalloped mountains recede into the distance. A lone tree leans off a bluff on the right. It is calm and competent and a little bit Bob Ross, painted directly onto red brick so the mortar lines run through the whole sky like a grid.

And the sun, rising over the mountains, throwing straight golden rays across the entire scene, is a glazed doughnut with sprinkles on it.

Nobody winks. There is no speech bubble, no logo, no ha. It is signed in the corner in cream script — D. Unger, 2016 — the way you would sign a landscape, because as far as this wall is concerned, it is one.