The Corrections

of flour were impastoed on the ferrous lobes of liver like corrosion. The bacon also, what little there was of it, had the color of rust.
    Chipper trembled in the bathroom doorway. You encountered a misery near the end of the day and it took a while to gauge its full extent. Some miseries had sharp curvature and could be negotiated readily. Others had almost no curvature and you knew you’d be spending hours turning the corner. Great whopping-big planet-sized miseries. The Dinner of Revenge was one of these.
    “How was your trip,” Enid asked Alfred because she had to sometime.
    “Tiring.”
    “Chipper, sweetie, we’re all sitting down.”
    “I’m counting to five,” Alfred said.
    “There’s bacon, you like bacon,” Enid sang. This was a cynical, expedient fraud, one of her hundred daily conscious failures as a mother.
    “Two, three, four,” Alfred said.
    Chipper ran to take his place at the table. No point in getting spanked.
    “Blessalor this foodier use nusta thy service make asair mindful neesa others Jesus name amen,” Gary said.
    A dollop of mashed rutabaga at rest on a plate expressed a clear yellowish liquid similar to plasma or the matter in a blister. Boiled beet greens leaked something cupric, greenish. Capillary action and the thirsty crust of flour drew bothliquids under the liver. When the liver was lifted, a faint suction could be heard. The sodden lower crust was unspeakable.
    Chipper considered the life of a girl. To go through life softly, to be a Meisner, to play in that house and be loved like a girl.
    “You want to see my jail I made with Popsicle sticks?” Gary said.
    “A jail, well well,” Alfred said.
    The provident young person neither ate his bacon immediately nor let it be soaked by the vegetable juices. The provident young person evacuated his bacon to the higher ground at the plate’s edge and stored it there as an incentive. The provident young person ate his bite of fried onions, which weren’t good but also weren’t bad, if he needed a preliminary treat.
    “We had a den meeting yesterday,” Enid said. “Gary, honey, we can look at your jail after dinner.”
    “He made an electric chair,” Chipper said. “To go in his jail. I helped.”
    “Ah? Well well.”
    “Mom got these huge boxes of Popsicle sticks,” Gary said.
    “It’s the Pack,” Enid said. “The Pack gets a discount.”
    Alfred didn’t think much of the Pack. A bunch of fathers taking it easy ran the Pack. Pack-sponsored activities were lightweight: contests involving airplanes of balsa, or cars of pinewood, or trains of paper whose boxcars were books read.
    (Schopenhauer: If you want a safe compass to guide you through life … you cannot do better than accustom yourself to regard this world as a penitentiary, a sort of penal colony .)
    “Gary, say again what you are,” said Chipper, for whom Gary was the glass of fashion. “Are you a Wolf?”
    “One more Achievement and I’m a Bear.”
    “What are you now, though, a Wolf?”
    “I’m a Wolf but basically I’m a Bear. All’s I have to do now is Conversation.”
    “Conservation,” Enid corrected. “All I have to do now is Conservation.”
    “It’s not Conversation?”
    “Steve Driblett made a gillateen but it didn’t work,” Chipper said.
    “Driblett’s a Wolf.”
    “Brent Person made a plane but it busted in half.”
    “Person is a Bear.”
    “Say broke, sweetie, not busted.”
    “Gary, what’s the biggest firecracker?” Chipper said.
    “M-80. Then cherry bombs.”
    “Wouldn’t it be neat to get an M-80 and put it in your jail and blow it up?”
    “Lad,” Alfred said, “I don’t see you eating your dinner.”
    Chipper was growing emceeishly expansive; for the moment, the Dinner had no reality. “Or seven M-80s,” he said, “and you blew ‘em all at once, or one after another, wouldn’t it be neat?”
    “I’d put a charge in every corner and then put extra fuse,” Gary said. “I’d wind the fuses together and detonate them all at once. That’s the best way to do it, isn’t it, Dad. Separate the charges and put an extra fuse, isn’t it. Dad?”
    “Seven thousand hundred million M-80s,” Chipper cried. He made explosive noises to suggest the megatonnage he had in mind.
    “Chipper,” Enid said with smooth deflection, “tell Dad where we’re all going next week.”
    “The den’s going to the Museum of Transport and I get to come, too,” Chipper recited.
    “Oh Enid.” Alfred made a sour