Quotation

Hit Me

a Keller Novel
A perfin and precancel collector he’d met at a show had told him about it, how the woman from Homeland Security had glared at his tongs as if they were an AK-47. “Look at this,” she’d said, holding them aloft. “Five, six inches long! Made of steel! You could put somebody’s eye out with these!” “I extended my index finger,” the man told Keller, “and I was just about to point out how easily I could use it to gouge her eye out, but something stopped me.” === Keller, who hadn’t needed to use the toilet, flushed it anyway in the interests of verisimilitude. === “I know, it’s like that essay everybody had to read in high school, burning down the house to roast the pig. I forget who wrote it.” “Charles Lamb.” === She’d prepared coq au vin. The coq, she told him, had grown up a mile and a half away, where he and his flock mates ranged free and enjoyed an organic diet.