The day passed quietly in a peculiar kind of languor, she utters a semblance of truth but puts a malevolent spin on it.
“All these spices – they kind of take your breath away. And what is that dreadful smell like fish?”
‘The holy one’s bath water is ready.”
The dream came to me once a month, with startling regularity. For a few days after whelping, especially if she has consumed the placenta, the bitch will usually have frequent, large, rather loose stools of a blackish color.
They were both restless in the night. The walnut furniture was upholstered in dark green velvet. She doesn’t care for that. Anyway, when I was in bed, I couldn’t pray worth a damn. I think back to those moments immediately after the verdict was announced, and the sound and the images of the courtroom play over and over in my mind. When still a child, living in a canary yellow, large, cold house where they were preparing me and hundreds of other children for secure nonexistence as adult dummies, into which all my coevals turned without effort or pain; already then, in those accursed days, amid rag books and brightly painted school materials and soul chilling drafts, I knew without knowing, I knew without wonder, I knew as one knows oneself, I knew what it is impossible to know –and, I would say, I knew it even more clearly than I do now.
Featuring: George Orwell, Dave Eggers, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ed Rosenblum, Judith Martin, Philip Roth, J.D. Salinger, Ivan Turgenev, Joan Didion, Vladimir Nabokov and Faye Resnick