THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT

55.  Peanut presented to me by MR. PEANUT, the peanut vendor in the quarter, my brother (“yessir, you’re my brother”), an old one-armed Algerian with a wrinkled face, who likes to recount the story of his missing left arm: “When I was little I fell out of a tree, yessir, really.  Then my arm turned completely black, yessir, it really turned completely black.  Afterwards I was able to remove the hand and throw it away, yessir, and later the whole arm turned black, and one day it fell off, yessir, that’s the truth, because we didn’t have any doctors, nobody went to see a doctor in those days, and that’s really true, yessir.”

Spoerri/Chance