Slapstick

Old Vera and I reminisced there on the townhouse steps about the Battle of Lake Maxinkuckee, in northern Indiana. I had seen it from a helicopter on my way to Urbana. Vera had been in the actual thick of it with her alcoholic husband, Lee Razorclam-13 Zappa. They were cooks in one of the King of Michigan's field kitchens on the ground below.

“You all looked like ants to me down there,” I said, “or like germs under a microscope.” We didn't dare come down close, for fear of being shot.

“That's what we felt like, too,” she said.

“If I had known you then, I would have tried to rescue you,” I said.

“That would have been like trying to rescue a germ from a million other germs, Wilbur,” she said.


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From Kurt Vonnegut's Slapstick, reproduced without permission.