Word: rats
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Sherlock Holmes once told Watson cryptically about the "giant rat of Sumatra." The terrible truth about the creature, Holmes said, is one "for which the world is not yet prepared." It was a lovely moment of conjuration: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle suddenly, out of nowhere, created the hairy monster, and just as suddenly he whisked it out of sight: the world was not yet prepared to confront the horror. So the giant rat lingers in the mind as an enigmatic apparition...
Interestingly, there does exist an animal called the giant rat of Sumatra, just as there does exist a beast called racism. Those facts (that the creatures actually exist) have nothing to do, however, with the art of telling horror stories and lies. That skill has its earliest development in the imagination of children, standing in front of angry parents and frantically inventing alibis. Sometimes children are brilliant...
...illusion of the giant rat of Sumatra appeared in Wappingers Falls, N.Y., last November. In the telling of the tale, the rat took the form of six white men, one wearing a badge, who carried Tawana Brawley into the dark woods and held her for four days and raped her and chopped her hair and wrote KKK and NIGGER on her body and smeared dog feces on her and left her in a plastic garbage bag just behind the apartment where her family had lived until two weeks earlier...
...Duke from Down Under versus the Rat from Colombia. We all know who wins. The audience rushes out of the theater, exalting the wisdom of Mick, and heads off to the nearest bar for a cold Foster's. In the purest Holly-wood tradition, the good guy walks off into the sunset with a woman at his side...
...Neill and future wife of Charlie Chaplin. In one unpublished letter, Salinger imagined a scene from the couple's domestic life: "I can see them at home evenings. Chaplin squatting grey and nude, atop his chiffonier, swinging his thyroid around his head by his bamboo cane, like a dead rat. Oona in an aquamarine gown, applauding madly from the bathroom." The banned Hamilton version: "At one point in a letter to Burnett ((Salinger)) provides a pen portrait of the Happy Hour Chez Chaplin: the comedian, ancient and unclothed, is brandishing his walking stick -- attached to the stick, and horribly resembling...