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Show Acting Alone pa g e 133 straight from out back in big old open cans for cooking. Shannon was a farmgirl and had drunk tons of raw milk in her day. But today she was a citified college girl, and she was worried that her mush wasn't cooked hot enough to kill the cowpox germs and icky field stuff. She tried to see but also not to see pieces of cow-chewed grass in her bowl. Only yesterday Polly had taken her to a chicken-pluck and -singe party here in the refectory. Shannon still felt as though she'd inhaled a ton of gasflame-singed pinfeather smoke. It smelled and tasted and burned like burnt hair, only stronger, if that was possible. After that, so she wouldn't hurt her big sister's feelings, Shannon had gone and watched Polly actually brush the teeth of a giant dead hog so they could boil the head and scrape off the top of the water and make something called head cheese. Shannon prayed head cheese was not anywhere near her plate, but she couldn't be sure because she'd never seen head cheese, even the farmgirl in her had never seen it, and there were a few things in bowls and piles around her plate that she didn't quite recognize. She could imagine what head cheese must be like, though. Sammy always made gross jokes about dick cheese. For ick. Then, for dessert, to top the meal off, they had asphalt chip ice cream. Asphalt chip ice cream was Simone Stylite's joke name for ice cream that was scraped off the highway after Baskin Robbins semi-trucks jackknifed and rolled over. The stuff was donated first to orphanages, then old folks' homes, then the nuns got their pick of the leftover weird flavors that even homeless babies and senile old people had enough sense not to eat: peanut |