Not Forever, But For Now

by Chuck Palahniuk

Otto, sad-eyed Otto, frowny-faced Otto, looks into the casket and says, “You think someone is going to be Pericles or Agamemnon, and then he’s not.”

Nightmares of phrenology they look to be, with cobblestone brows and lantern jaws. The faces of cinema monsters sprouting cauliflower ears, to boot. Teeth as tilted and mossy as tombstones in an ancient churchyard.

Here, Otto said the strangest thing. He said, “All whores take to hell every man they’ve had inside them, they do.” He said, “That’s why Satan makes whores, Daddy.” At the time, Otto was smaller than I am now. And such wisdom!

He recites by heart the parts we hear by heart.

“Word is, around the whole of the county,” says nanny, “that this house is haunted, Master Cecil.”

Per Otto, all birthdays do is grow a person old. It’s having too many birthdays that kills most people, it is.

“I’d like to do what I can for you,” says Grandfather. “It’s not your fault that you’re an abomination before the eyes of God.”

Such a slender, skin-and-bones, skeletal thing, he’s like an idea wearing clothes.

Here’s the end of a ragged day, when the sky is so shot through with bands of orange and red that if you put it in a painting people would laugh.

We’re bright young things, and no bright young thing wants to squander his life as a custodian to the dead.

Otto gives me a look. “Cecil, America sounds ghastly.”

Time had stood still for her, poor Evelyn, shut away from sunlight, and some steady diet of millet porridge had given her the slender figure of a mummy dredged from an Irish peat bog.