I was a strange boy. Small and sly, I was sometimes consumed by peculiar thoughts and imaginings. You’d never have suspected it from my fine features and angelic blue eyes.
Other boys got their kicks scuffling with each other, playing war, and with a magnifying glass or the lens of their glasses focusing the sun’s rays on ants until they went up in a puff of smoke. But that wasn’t suspenseful enough for me.
My game was thoroughly thought out. I picked out a washed and rinsed glass kosher pickle jar from a garbage can in the kitchen, a box of wooden matches, and a Viceroy filter-tipped cigarette filched from the pack my father, a recently reformed smoker, kept hidden behind the radiator for emergencies and sudden cravings,beside a pack of playing cards with naked women on the back. I plucked off the filter and saved it for a special purpose.
From the drawer of my father’s workbench in the basement I next fetched a hammer and a thick nail with which I banged a hole in the top of the metal cover of the pickle jar. So far so good. Then I got me some ice cubes from the freezer. “I’m thirsty,” I muttered aloud.
Busy, meanwhile, preparing the Sabbath meal, with no inkling of my intentions, my mother merrily recounted how in her youth in Vienna before World War I, huge blocks of ice were delivered. They were carried by a man holding a giant pair of pincers gripping the ice block...
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