Shawn Huelle

Three Ton Coworker - Smarter or Stronger

". . . and I after beast, / kind and ultraviolet, discover myself incandescent / lit among simple white tile surrounded by bucket, / comet, soft scrub, and brush kneeling at my john." —Gordon Massman, "1381"

I reached to grab the corn, and dragged my tie through the gravy on my mashed potatoes. So I took the tie off, and spent the rest of the meal looking like the cheap second cousin we didn't invite because he would have dragged his tie through the gravy.

While we were sipping coffee and waiting for the pie to cool, dad said that during the war and its aftermath, the whores in France had not really been any better than the whores in Germany, but rather it was all to do with some sexual mythos France had built for itself and the rest of the world had swallowed. It was the same with the story about the Germans being ruthlessly efficient, he went on to say, his voice rising, you don't fight a war on multiple fronts and try to wipe out a people at the same time. If you want to be truly ruthlessly efficient, you do one and then the other, based on your priorities, which are the hallmark of efficiency. Hitler was like a little fucking kid in a candy store, grabbing at everything all at once and the Americans didn't win because they were smarter or stronger or somehow—and here he stabbed his fork into the uneaten turkey leg in front of him, causing bits of oil and fat which had accumulated under the leg to splat halfway across the table and into my aunt's highball—morally superior, they won because . . .

His voice drifted away and my mother, who was just bringing the pie in from the kitchen, and whom I had watched through the kitchen door as she deflated and then re-inflated herself miraculously quickly during this, today's tirade, finished his sentence for him: They won because Americans immediately eat the candy they grab, stuffing their mouths full and swallowing without chewing, and that is likely also why they didn't notice any qualitative difference between the French and German whores.

The whores were probably all Polish anyway, said my aunt as she made a show of slurping down the turkey fat globule with the rest of her drink.