The Dish Ran Away With My Dinner

There was a duck living under my ranch. i waited every day for something like that to break up the tone of the evening conversation, but all I had to go on was a red and black spider torso and a humid kind of mossy smell that made me think of the lake when it's too warm for winter. The frozen bluffs I used to crawl around on probably wouldn't support my weight anymore, and that would be fine except that what I've been trying to do now for the past six months, ever since the city got evacuated and the air raid sirens didn't warn us anymore before the bombs blew right in our faces, is fish a little bit with this old fishing pole I dug out of the back of a plymouth voyager. Annie told me not to get excited when I saw the walgreens across the street wasn't on fire anymore, because all I was going to find in there would be jars and jars and jars of ladyfingers, and those things have like not nutritional value in them whatsoever, like I might as well be bringing toenail clippings back for both of us to eat. Earl said that he had to do that once, eat up all his toenails. He's all scarred up because of this fire, and his eyes are yellow from drinking too much rum. You can see his collar bones, his clavicles right through the Chicago Bears t shirt he always wears. He said he figured that since it was something that grew from his body from eating food that it probably had at least some kind of vitamins or minerals in it. So he'd bit off his fingernails and his toenails, too, whenever he happened to notice that they were bitable, and suck on them for awhile to get them soft so they wouldn't poke at his insides. Then, he said, he'd snuffle some salty snot into his mouth and swallow the whole mixture, down the hatch. "It got specially bad when this one time I caught myself bitin them down even over the skin, and not just waitin. Then's when I knew I'd been forgetting to hustle me up some food." He asked me to buy him a steak with my food stamps and I was like how the heck are you gonna cook it? and he said he could get probably four or five bucks for it. I was in the grocery store for too long and he came in to look for me, and I just gave him four dollars I was going to use to buy a spatula with.