The necropsy happened at the one-million-dollar wedding. How was it that a wedding got so expensive? The answer is that it wasn't expensive because the people who threw it were billionaires. My father's favorite joke: What's the quickest way to become a millionaire? Start out as a multi millionaire.
They had to verify that the child's mouth was full of bread dough. He had learned to make the bread dough by reading a book. The book warned him not to put it in his mouth because bread dough is so easy to choke on. It is so easy to find it heavy when all your plants are weeds and your tomatoes are still green. He wondered what it would be like to drop his car through the roof of his house. Is it necessary to say that he found the billboards in the town offensive? All the billboards advertised liquor and soda pop. Just liquor and pop. All that was on the tv were ads for liquor and pop. All that was on the billboards were ads for liquor and pop. When the teacher asked the students if they had any questions, all the questions of the children had to do with liquor and pop. His father, ever night, drank Canadian whiskey and ginger ale. If whiskey is spelled with an "e," then that means it's from the US. If it's not spelled with an "e," then that means it came from England. His father drank whiskey and ginger ale every evening. The whiskey came in a dark brown bottle and had a simple white label with black letters on it. His father would peel off the label and give it to him. "Write me a story on the back of it," he'd tell his son. His father was always asking him to tell him a story. At first, the son felt great pressure to tell his father stories. But then he noticed that his father liked all his stories. The son found that, in order to tell his father a good story, all he needed was two people who didn't like each other and a terrible, ugly room.
His father had worked in the bug factory for 17 years before they dismissed him with no warning. At the bug factory, they grew meal worms by the ton for consumption. They grew cicadas by the ton for consump. They grew great horned beetles by the ton. They grew crickets. That was all they grew at the bug factory. They grew the meal worms and the crickets in a large building. They had a field of trees outside for the cicadas. The cicadas had to lay dormant underground for a few years before they came up and affixed themselves to the bottoms of the tree branches. Then, they'd crawl out of their shells, and the people at the bug factory would catch them with nets. His father was one of the best at catching cicadas. Ever since he was young, his father would bring home cicada shells for him. The shells looked just like the bugs--only they had no bugs in them. The boy would paint them and play with them. He had painted hundreds of these bugs, and he even sold them at school to other children. He pretended they were soldiers.
His father got fired from the bug factory with no notice. The boy was home because he didn't go to school. He wasn't home schooled either. He was something new. His father wanted him to learn by learning only what he wanted to learn. So if the boy wanted to plant garlic, he had to learn how to do it. If he wanted to build a potato cannon, he had to learn how to do it. If he wanted to learn. The father came home. He comes home. This father comes home. He has his pants still tucked into his boots because that's what everyone at the factory does. He has a bag full of horned beetles and some of the gigantic Brazilian cockroaches that hiss. "They gave me these for severance," he told the boy. "As if I couldn't have stole them all these years." He has his bags of bugs. He also has a large bottle of Canadian whiskey and some 2-liter bottles of ginger ale. The pop bottles are green plastic. The liquid inside them is gold. The father buys the cheapest ginger ale. It is so cheap that, as soon as he opens it, it goes flat. The father takes a class. He chips it against the table so that, when he drinks from it, it will make him bleed. He fills it most of the way with whiskey and leaves a couple of inches for ginger ale. "Would you like some ginger ale?" he asks his son.
He was fired. He is fired. He is let go. He drinks his whiskey for many weeks before he decided to teach a class at the local high school. He will not teach for money because he knows they would never hire him. He will not teach for money because he wants to teach the children how to write stories, and no one would ever pay him to teach anyone to write a story. He wants to hear their stories. He asks his son all the time to tell him a story. That has been his son's only education. He thinks that, if his son can always tell a story, then that's all the education he will need. There is nothing more than that. His son does not got to school. He tells his son that, as long as he, his father, is alive, his son will never have to get a job and work. He can always live with his father. He cannot expect, though, that they will live in a style. They have the bugs that they eat. They grown bugs in the house. They have a garden in which they grow corn and beans and garlic. That's all they need. They have four chickens for eggs. That's their diet: bugs, corn, lima beans, garlic. Sometimes, they grow other things, but they don't depend on them.
The father teaches his class at the school. He wants his students to get closer to death, so he writes up permission forms. He asks the parents if they will allow their children to have knives thrown at them. The knives will be thrown by pros, of course. Pros from the carnival. Many of the parents do not sign the forms. Many of the parents complain to the school. But many of the parents are persuaded by his permission form and like the idea of their children learning something by having knives thrown at them. So he has knife throwers come to class and throw knives at children. He has the children wear bullet-proof vests, and he shoots them. (All after permission forms, of course.) He takes them to the morgue so that they can view autopsies. First, the medical examiner cuts the body's head. Then, the examiner peels the body's forehead over its eyes, revealing its skull. Then, with an electric saw, the examiner cuts into the skull. The examiner removes the brain. The examiner lays the body onto a metal table and cuts open its chest, only, instead of making the classic Y-shaped incision, the examiner makes one that's in the shape of an asterisk. When the examiner opens the body up, the body looks like it's open like a flower.
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