OCR Text |
Show CHRYSALIS PAGE 143 Children, stop growing! Hair and fingernails, stop! Nerves and muscles and cells, stop! Old people: not one more wrinkle, you hear? Not one more white hair! Freeze. Clocks and trains and dinners on the stove, stone-cold bubbles in the stew, half-baked pies in stone-cold ovens, doors ha If-slammed, mouths half-open to speak. Everybody, stop! Freeze! I worry most about my inability to bear pain. I have read about a doctor in London who mixes heroin and cocaine "cocktails" which keep her dying patients alert and pain-free. But such drugs are illegal here, even in controlled situations. Why? I DON'T WANT TO HAVE TO DIE IN PAIN! A portrait of fear: I am eight years old. Fear is running up the street for home with a big dog barking behind me, showing his long teeth. Fear is listening to the sighs and groans the wind makes in the stovepipe. Fear is waiting for trees to grow out of ray stomach from apple-seeds I swallowed. Fear, today, is waiting for dragons to sprout somewhere in my brain, in my lungs or bones, from impious seeds I swallowed yesterday- Does God punish mindless irreverent lapses of youthful behavior so harshly? The question still haunts me. I'm sorry, okay? I'm sorry. I'm sorry! |