"Certain empty houses that seemed to stare like the faces of people suffering from terrible mental illnesses.  An empty barn on the outskirts of town, the hayloft door swinging slowly open and closed on rusty hinges, first disclosing darkness, then hiding it, then disclosing it again.  A splintered fence on Kossuth Street, just a block away from the house where Mrs. Dunning and her children had lived.  To me that fence looked as if something -- or someone -- had been hurled through it and into the Barrens below.  An empty playground with the roundy-round slowly spinning even though there were no kids to push it and no appreciable wind to turn it.  It screamed on its hidden bearings as it moved.  One day I saw a roughly carved Jesus go floating down the canal and into the tunnel that ran beneath Canal Street.  It was three feet long.  The teeth peeped from lips parted in a snarling grin.  A crown of thorns, jauntily askew, circled the forehead; bloody tears had been painted below the thing's weird white eyes.  It looked like a juju fetish.  On the so-called Kissing Bridge in Bassey Park, among the declarations of school spirit and undying love, someone had carved the words I WILL KILL MY MOTHER SOON, and below it someone had added: NOT SOON ENOUGH SHES FULL OF DISEEZE.  One afternoon while walking on the east side of the Barrens, I heard a terrible squealing and looked up to see the silhouette of a thin man standing on the GS & WM railroad trestle not far away.  A stick rose and fell in his hand.  He was beating something.  The squealing stopped and I thought, It was a dog and he's finished with it.  He took it out there on a rope leash and beat it until it was dead.  There was no way I could have known such a thing, of course . . . and yet I did.  I was sure then, and I am now."
- posted by cjb @ 8:07 PM