November 6, 1909 [Nursing a Viper]

Leon Czolgosz raises his revolver—it cost him a mere $4.50, and it seemed too light in his hand, it might as well have been a small stick, not even good enough to bash a rat—and he aims at an easy target, big, solid as a giant potato, William McKinley suddenly as small as Leon—smaller, he thinks, like all of them now.

Charles Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities describes the pile of heads in the basket beneath La Guillotine—which had kissed them one last time with lips as sharp as the report of a small revolver—and he tells us that when the good wine-dark work was done for the day they had a hell of a time pulling the heads apart as they too kissed one last time, more of a hungry bite into each others' cheeks and what was left of their necks, and clamped down at last and forever.

Nursing a Viper makes the aristocrats flee into the bushes, pursued by the hungry and the sick, all wild with it—and when they find those aristocrats they stab the men and rape the women and put heads on stakes and dance and dance. And the one who hides in the Republican's house, dressed as a servant and almost safe, also gets sick and hungry and takes a stab—as it were—at the wife, and he's tossed into the dance as well. We do not see him taken down—it's enough to know the nursed viper gets it—but I'm not sure when to leave, or even if I should, the winter already coming, the slick and freezing rain already running down the street like wine making me dance with arms thrust outward to stop an inevitable fall.