The Plot Against America

by Philip Roth

So then, for every reason imaginable it was a devastating night. I didn’t have the capacity in 1942 to begin to decipher all the awful implications, but just the sight of my father’s and Alvin’s blood was stunning enough. Blood spattered the length and breadth of our imitation Oriental rug, blood dripping from the splintered remains of our coffee table, blood smeared like a sign across my father’s forehead, blood spurting from my cousin’s nose—and the two of them not so much fistfighting, not so much wrestling as caroming, with a terrible bony thwack colliding, rearing back and charging in like men with antlers branching from their brows, fantastical, cross-species creatures sprung from mythology into our living room and pulping each other’s flesh with their massive, snaggletoothed horns. Inside a house you usually scale down your movements, you scale down your speed, but here the scale of things was reversed and terrifying to behold.