When You Are Engulfed in Flames

by David Sedaris

If I was a child and saw something creeping out of a hole in my mother’s leg, I would march to the nearest orphanage and put myself up for adoption. I would burn all pictures of her, destroy anything she had ever given me, and start all over because that is simply disgusting.

The suspenders and knickers were bad enough, but when I added a top hat, he planted himself in the doorway and physically prevented me from leaving the house. “It doesn’t make sense,” I remember him saying. “That hat with those pants, worn with the damn platform shoes…” His speech temporarily left him, and he found himself waving his hands, no doubt wishing that they held magic wands. “You’re just… a mess is what you are.”

My fanny kept me warm in the winter and early spring, but come hot weather it turned on me. The problem was the nylon padding, which, when coupled with a high temperature, acted much like a heating pad, causing me to sweat away what little ass I’d had in the first place. Chafed and bony, by early June my natural bottom resembled a rusted coin slot.

There it called to me, sirenlike, until a houseguest arrived, a tall, forlorn-looking woman who compared her ass, and not too favorably, to a cast-iron skillet. “I’ve got just the thing for you,” I said. It wasn’t my intention to give it to her, but after she tried it on, and I saw how happy it made her, how could I not? The woman stayed with us for a week, and while I hated for her to leave, I sort of loved watching her go.

“A bow tie announces to the world that you can no longer get an erection.”

Three men are shot to death while attending a child’s christening, and you tell yourself, Sure. They were hanging out with the wrong crowd. But buying a hamburger? I buy hamburgers. Or I used to, anyway.

She had performed the victim’s autopsy and was testifying on behalf of the prosecution. There were plenty of things that should have concerned me—the blood-spatter evidence, the trajectory of the bullets—but all I could concentrate on was the defendant’s mother, who’d come to court wearing cutoff jeans and a Ghostbusters T-shirt. It couldn’t have been easy for her, but still you had to wonder: what would she consider a dress-up occasion?