Beginning Year Number Nine in Chronic 1A (1987)
I used to want to ask Johnson how to control things, how to control even my arms and legs, but he would have only laughed. Johnson is convinced I’ve gone the same place as Hewlitt, that we have both surpassed the need for our bodies, that if he is dedicated enough he might someday be like us. Besides, he would have said, had I been able to ask, how was he to know I wasn’t a spy, sitting immobile in my wheelchair for eight years in order to trick him into revealing his methods?
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A Raid on Donahue’s Bread (1990)
MacManus could have targeted any of the others: Saunders, Kinnon, Ayers, Britton, or Halvington. But Saunders was fleet of foot, with a vindictive nature; Kinnon was bread-wise and kept a close guard on his slices; Ayers was on a diet and got no bread at all, and so was on the prowl himself; and Britton and Halvington operated on the buddy system and were mutual body and bread guards. That left only Donahue. It had to be Donahue.
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I Think of Cindi (1987)
A millipede, seeking relief from the green spray paint insanity, comes inside, where the real insanity is. It bustles over the window ledge, its multitudinous legs working in tandem. All those legs! I wonder if it could spare a pair, What kind of god would give a bug thirty pairs and deny me the use of just one?
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Just Another Year in Chronic 1A (1988)
We’re on the big goddamned yellow and black school bus, on our way to a “picnic,” which means we’ll stop at a roadside park with three trees and two concrete picnic tables and eat extra krispy recipe Kentucky Fried Chicken, bones and all, and maybe even the plastic sporks, the hungrier of us. Then we will be put back on the bus and driven back to the hospital, where we will disembark and be rolled back to the musty, dusty, and always gloomy buildings, back to the chronic wards.
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