Free The Cry of the Sloth by Sam Savage Page A

children imitate barnyard animals or is that something only city children do?
    I see this letter is much too long. I wonder if you are still reading. Maybe you got fed up halfway through, and all this time I’ve been talking to nobody. Imagine a man in a room talking about himself, perhaps in a very boring way, while looking down at the floor. And while he goes on with his monologue, which as I said is of interest only to himself, one by one the other people in the room tiptoe away until he is all alone, the last one shutting the door silently behind him. Finally the man looks up and sees what has happened, and of course he is overcome by feelings of ridicule and shame. Maybe this letter is now at the bottom of your wastepaper basket, a tiny trivial voice in the depths of a tin well, rattling on and on. Is your wastepaper basket made of tin? How unbearably sad. If you have come with me this far, I want to say that I appreciate your company, and also your letters, and would like to have more of those, if you feel like writing again.
    Andy
    ¶
    Dear Mr. Watts,
    I did receive the notice about the trash. I do understand that you cannot gather up any items that are not bagged, binned, or otherwise confined in approved receptacles. And yes, I am aware that this has happened before. I do not, however, feel that this justifies your use of the phrase “repeat offender.” Each time it has happened I have gone over there myself and picked it all up. If you drive by now you will find more than a sufficient number of trash cans; three, to be exact, unless one has been stolen already. It is really not my fault that they don’t use them.
    Sincerely.
    Andrew Whittaker
    ¶
    Ahoy, Willy,
    I have had no word from you about the April thing. I know it has been less than three weeks since I wrote, but I had assumed you would jump at the chance for that kind of exposure. Maybe your teaching job lets you feel secure enough that you can turn your back on the larger public, and even your old friends, if that’s what you are doing. I envy you the luxury of both. I myself have to descend every day into the pit and battle for a living, and I have been cursed with a dogged loyalty to anyone who has ever given me a pat on the head or a shake to my furry paw. After a month of tropical heat, it has been raining here for weeks. The newspaper is full of pictures of flooded farms. I am getting quite moldy. Moldy and morose. Morose and wondering why I am not hearing from Willy. I have at last begun work on the big novel I had been putting off for so long. I have bided my time, I have practiced my craft, I have collected experiences. And now the words are coming out perfect; I excrete them almost without effort. They land on the page and stay there. I envisage an oddly musical structure: a groaning basso profundo of despair broken by burlesque interludes and periodic shrieks of hysteria. I am especially fond of the shrieks—they strike me as just so
typical
. I think by next April I’ll have enough to be able to read a chapter or two at the gala. A lot of people around here have got used to thinking that I’ll never produce anything, and so that’s sure to make a splash.
    Along with the novel, which is the really important thing, I have in the works a very funny parody of that bastard Troy Sokal, set in Wisconsin farm country, same place he puts his novels. Until you’ve tried it you can’t imagine how hard it is to write badly well. And I have ideas for a series of prose poems, little existential parables of tedium and despair, set in Africa probably.
    I’d like to tell you more about everything, especially about what the last couple of years have been like, but right now my brand-new maid is turning the house upside down around my ears. I requested an experienced cleaning woman and they sent me a Mexican girl who has to ask how to turn on the vacuum. Charmingly shy, but a little too Aztec for my taste. From the neck down, though, she’s what people