CivilWarLand in Bad Decline: Stories and a Novella by George Saunders
Authors: George Saunders
Ads: Link
church comes up to his knees and he’s losing his mind. Hefeels bad for having designed the see-through cow. Of late he’s been kicking the diorama apart, and the scuttlebutt is he’s one building away from dismissal. I say good morning and he sits down disconsolately on Mount Hood. At the Nutritional Evaluation Module several teenage members of Special Duties are estimating their percentage bodyfat by typing information in on a giant lettuce head. I say hello and they look over at me meanly.
The world has certainly changed since I was a girl.
At ninety-two years old people assume you’re dense. They assume you don’t remember being young and have corny moral values and can’t hear well. But oh how I remember sex with Herb, the one good man I’ve known. He played a beautiful soft guitar. We met at a fruit stand. How we experimented in his trailer before my husband Bud and his repulsive gangster friends slit his throat and dumped him off a barge into the CalSag. After killing Herb the lot of them came over to our place for dinner as usual. Oh I was beside myself. All of them had excellent appetites. Every Sunday they came. After eating they would take their shirts off and talk gangster strategy in the front room. I would do the dishes and sit on the porch in hopes they would forget about me. But invariably Bud would have me try on a dress for the group. The day he killed Herb he made me put on a cigarette-girl get-up and serve dessert out of it bending low.
Perhaps I should have put up more of a fight but after what happened to my brother I was never one to rock the boat. He was a Wobbly and went out West, where they cut off his penis and hung him from a bridge. And did you know they shipped him back without cleaning him up onebit and my poor mother had to view the body of her only son without its penis and with such a horrible rope burn on the neck?
She was never the same. We were continually finding dead chicks about the house.
And that is why I moved to the city.
That is why I moved to the city and before long was married to a man with all gold teeth, who used them to bite painful arcs into my legs. Bud was brutal through and through. A young girl gets extremely worked up on the honeymoon and the next thing she knows her new husband is scampering into the kitchen for a zucchini squash. Even through my crying he insisted, saying it would bring us closer together. Imagine the humiliation of being just eighteen and having to go to your family doctor with an infection difficult to explain. Finally he found it in a plant book. That you don’t live down. But what I’ve put up with I’ve put up with for what I thought at the time was love. What was I to do? Nowadays things may be different but in those days a woman had no place to go.
At the eighth of the nine display cases explaining about diesels my knees give out and I sit down next to an empty popcorn box on a marble bench. At my age, every time you sit down you fall asleep. When I wake up Mitzi’s taking a photograph of me supine. She’s Mr. Spencer’s young tart. For months she’s been shopping around for a doctor willing to surgically lengthen her legs. Mr. Spencer never asks her to clean vomit. He never asks her to do anything but you-know-what in a bunk in the captured Nazi sub.
She says: When Matt sees this shot he’ll take you down to four an hour so fast it’ll make your head spin.
Then she goes off, practicing a sexy way of walking.
I picture her hanging on the meathook Bud and company kept in their gangster clubhouse, then proceed down to The Wonder That Is Our Body.
The Pickled Babies range in age from two weeks to full term. They float in green fluid in jars with black lids. Often in the Louis Pasteur Memorial Break Room we speculate on how they were obtained. I’m certain Dr. Cardilla would have had my stillborns disposed of in a Christian manner. Don’t think I haven’t closely inspected the face of the full-term. That poor fellow
The world has certainly changed since I was a girl.
At ninety-two years old people assume you’re dense. They assume you don’t remember being young and have corny moral values and can’t hear well. But oh how I remember sex with Herb, the one good man I’ve known. He played a beautiful soft guitar. We met at a fruit stand. How we experimented in his trailer before my husband Bud and his repulsive gangster friends slit his throat and dumped him off a barge into the CalSag. After killing Herb the lot of them came over to our place for dinner as usual. Oh I was beside myself. All of them had excellent appetites. Every Sunday they came. After eating they would take their shirts off and talk gangster strategy in the front room. I would do the dishes and sit on the porch in hopes they would forget about me. But invariably Bud would have me try on a dress for the group. The day he killed Herb he made me put on a cigarette-girl get-up and serve dessert out of it bending low.
Perhaps I should have put up more of a fight but after what happened to my brother I was never one to rock the boat. He was a Wobbly and went out West, where they cut off his penis and hung him from a bridge. And did you know they shipped him back without cleaning him up onebit and my poor mother had to view the body of her only son without its penis and with such a horrible rope burn on the neck?
She was never the same. We were continually finding dead chicks about the house.
And that is why I moved to the city.
That is why I moved to the city and before long was married to a man with all gold teeth, who used them to bite painful arcs into my legs. Bud was brutal through and through. A young girl gets extremely worked up on the honeymoon and the next thing she knows her new husband is scampering into the kitchen for a zucchini squash. Even through my crying he insisted, saying it would bring us closer together. Imagine the humiliation of being just eighteen and having to go to your family doctor with an infection difficult to explain. Finally he found it in a plant book. That you don’t live down. But what I’ve put up with I’ve put up with for what I thought at the time was love. What was I to do? Nowadays things may be different but in those days a woman had no place to go.
At the eighth of the nine display cases explaining about diesels my knees give out and I sit down next to an empty popcorn box on a marble bench. At my age, every time you sit down you fall asleep. When I wake up Mitzi’s taking a photograph of me supine. She’s Mr. Spencer’s young tart. For months she’s been shopping around for a doctor willing to surgically lengthen her legs. Mr. Spencer never asks her to clean vomit. He never asks her to do anything but you-know-what in a bunk in the captured Nazi sub.
She says: When Matt sees this shot he’ll take you down to four an hour so fast it’ll make your head spin.
Then she goes off, practicing a sexy way of walking.
I picture her hanging on the meathook Bud and company kept in their gangster clubhouse, then proceed down to The Wonder That Is Our Body.
The Pickled Babies range in age from two weeks to full term. They float in green fluid in jars with black lids. Often in the Louis Pasteur Memorial Break Room we speculate on how they were obtained. I’m certain Dr. Cardilla would have had my stillborns disposed of in a Christian manner. Don’t think I haven’t closely inspected the face of the full-term. That poor fellow
Similar Books
