DAY

"The stationmaster at St. Cloud's was a lonely, unattractive man-a victim of mail-order catalogues and of an especially crackpot mail-order religion. The; latter, whose publication took an almost comic book form, was delivered monthly; the last month's issue, for example, had a cover illustration of a skeleton in soldier's clothes flying on a winged zebra over a battlefield that vaguely resembled the trenches of World War I. The other mailorder catalogues were of a more standard variety, but the stationmaster was such a victim of his superstitions that his dreams frequently confused the images of his mailorder religious material with the household gadgets, nursing bras, folding chairs, and giant zucchinis he saw advertised in the catalogues.

Thus it was not unusual for him to be awakened in a night terror by a vision of coffins levitating from a picture-perfect garden-the prize-winning vegetables taking flight with the corpses. There was one catalogue devoted entirely to fishing equipment; the stationmaster's cadavers were often seen, in waders or carrying rods and nets; and then there were the undergarment catalogues, advertising bras and girdles. The flying dead in bras and girdles especially frightened the stationmaster."

John Irving, The Cider House Rules