Further Variations of a Text by Vallejo

Abstract

It will be a Saturday like today, because today, Saturday, I can smell, on this thick breeze from the south, the stockyards. It’s an odor not quite fetid, not quite sweet, as I imagine death must be to those not quite happy to be in Omaha, in a heat wave, on a Saturday. And I think it will be a Saturday because today the butchers’ wives have packed the Safeway, and they stand talking beside their cars in the parking lot, their voices shrill above the traffic, and even when the traffic is drowned out by a B-52 bom ber taking off from SAC, they keep talking as if nothing happened.