ANNIES LAUGHING PLACE, it says. He didnt know the answer to that one, either The pain was somewhere below the sounds. He also saw gooey splatters of food on the housecoat, and she had only managed to get on one of her slippers. These things all came at widely spaced intervals, but then as the pain itself began not to recede but to erode (as that Revere Beach piling must itself have eroded, he thought, because nothing is forever — although the child he had been would have scoffed at such heresy), outside things began to impinge more rapidly until the objective world, with all its freight of memory, experience, and prejudice, had pretty much re-established itself.
""I should be thanking you.
A mound of lime Jell-O covered with a crack-glaze of dried whipped cream stood on top of the TV next to a two-liter plastic bottle of Pepsi and a gravy-boat. The paper, thick as it was, had tom in several places under the fury of the hand which had driven the pen.