Sitting With the Dead

One Easter, when the man in the hat was seven or eleven, his ma and da took him to the petting-zoo at the Waymart. In a pen the size of a small backyard, there was a veritable coterie of animals, animals to be petted and hand-fed raw pellets of animal-food, animals with shorn off ears and bumps on their heads, animals with dry mottled fur and crossed eyes, animals that could neither jump or hop, animals with pen-sores and hard grainy feces stuck to their backs and bellies. The man in the hat hand-fed the baby lambs as they seemed less likely to jump over the fence and bite his face off, or fall over backwards dead, scuttled in their own feces and urine. The petting-zoo keeper, a man by the name of Kribbs, wore soiled coveralls and a bottle-washers cap, the type worn by Coca Cola bottlers and booze-can proprietors.

The man in the hat’s parents bought him a book called ‘Sitting With the Dead’. He secretly called it ‘Shitting in Bed’, thinking it a better name for a book about diapered dead people. He secretly hoped that the petting-zoo keeper Kribbs ended up in one of those smelly old-folks homes, and that the old-folks attendants fed him animal food and warm Coca Cola. Whenever he thought about Kribbs covered in grainy feces and pen-sores he would laugh until his sides split. Easter’s were a time for remembering and forgetting, a time for garishly painted eggs and cheap paper-hats. The beauty and splendor of painted eggs was plain stupid, even if they were done with melted wax and fruit-dye. Dead diapered dead people were far more intriguing, especially if their name was Kribbs.