Chapter

A chapter had a problem with its book. Not the usual complaint about being cut up in a book next to other slimy characters, some of them too dramatic for their own good. No, it always wanted to be a dentist, not a section of a novel. When told by the book that training was too expensive, and that in any case it had no teeth, the chapter went on a killing spree. Down went Don Quixote, down went Heathcliff, down went Cujo. White pages drank their own letters and spit up blood. The librarians refused to come near, saying they had to re-file some periodicals downstairs, and the literary critics hushed up the whole business by saying the author was due to an "accident," not a murder. Oh, chapter, I want to tell it, you should listen to surf music. In the perfect wave you can surf the country. In your woody you can slip into deep, deep sleep, hundreds of fathoms below the ocean, wake up in the curriculum, dead and white and tall.