Ken Nordine Original Sin

I have to tell you about a character. He was very careful. Married to a very careful woman. And the live in a home that they care for very much. He lives a very regular, regulated life, as she does. And they like it that way.

One day he came home from the office and his wife said, "Darling I...I think we have mice."

He said "no, no."

"Yes, I hear little scratchy noises in the wall"

"No, it's impossible."

He went downstairs and they didn't have mice, they had something in the same family. Larger. And this so shook him that he ran back upstairs and locked the door and got the encyclopedia out and began reading about...Black Death, and bubonic plague. And it made him so nervous that he called the man who owned the hardware store and he said "Look, I know you're closed, but I've got to get some rat poison right away" and he went over and he got ten dollars worth of rat poison in a paper bag which he bravely through down from the head of the stairs, locked the doors, and spent a fitful night.

In the morning the problem was solved. All the vermin were gone. Unfortunately, however, they only ate twenty-five cents worth of the poison. So he had nine dollars and seventy-five cents of original-sin, if you will, and he didn't want it there anymore than you would. So, that morning, as he drove to work, going through a neighborhood that he had never paid any particular attention to before. He rolled down the window and threw the bag out. And for the rest of his natural, unnatural life, he never gave it a second thought.

Of course, all of this happened a long, long time ago. But do you know that in that neighborhood there was a dog, a mongrel. He loved to howl at the moon. He was a poet-dog. And that dog ate the poison and died. And to this day every neighbor in that neighborhood has a theory as to which lousy neighbor poisoned the dog.