"Why did you leave your wife?" she said.
"Because she ate shrimp," he said. "I couldn't-- You see, it was Friday, and I thought how at noon I'd go to the station and get the box of shrimp off the train and walk home with it, counting a hundred steps and changing hands with it, and it--."
"Did you do this every day?" the woman asked.
"No. Just Friday. But I have done it for ten years, since we were married. And I still don't like to smell shrimp. But I wouldn't mind the carrying it home so much. I could stand that. It's because the package drips. All the way home it drips and drips, until after a while I follow myself to the station and stand aside and watch Horace Benbow take that box off the train and start home with it, changing hands every hundred steps, and I follow him, thinking Here lies Horace Benbow in a fading series of stinking spots on a Mississippi sidewalk."
-- Sanctuary by William Faulkner
1 comment:
I love it.
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