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The bread slices collapsed like movie-set walls beneath her bite; the mayonnaise squished, the cucumber snapped tartly like the spine of an elf.
These murdered hills were for untold centuries green.
The history of the Catholic Church is written on charred pages splashed with gore. It is a history of inquisitions and genocides, of purges and perversions, of ravings and razings.
bars
When I was twelve years old I watched a spider drink water. You think that didn't change my life?”
“The hot dog is not so much a food as it is an institution. President Roosevelt fed hot dogs to the king and queen of England when they visited here in 1939. Babe Ruth ate nothing but hot dogs and soda pop for twenty years. Hot dogs are found wherever Boy Scouts get together. It is hot dogs the packers have in mind when they boast that they use everything but the squeal. It's not what hot dogs are made of but what they symbolize. The hot dog is the pillar of democracy, the pride of the Yankees, the boneless eagle of free enterprise.”
If I should die before I wake. Until I learned that macabre line it had never occurred to me that one morning I might not get up to play. The thought of death creeping into the covers with me shaded my young soul and marked me with an existential dread that has lingered, embellished through the years, into manhood. How many other Christian children have lost their purchase on life and liberty while on their bunny-suit knees repeating the chilling words of that nursery-room plea for immortality? I wonder.
