Stranger Than Kindness

A 100% True Story.

I was fourteen. In Mr. Bland’s English class, the assignment was to first create a silhouette of our heads, on posterboard, and then decorate it with images, words, whatever—things that represented who we really were. Naturally, I decided to cut my silhouette out, cover a similar-sized piece of posterboard with white-on-black polka-dotted wrapping paper, and then glue my silhouette down on that. (Needless to add, a couple of Bono’s lyrics also made it onto the collage.) I had no trouble laying down images of my favorite musicians, writers and actors. But at the time, I was a vegetarian, and possibly a member of PETA as well, if memory serves. And I wanted a small image of a cute baby animal to add to the collage. And there was nothing. Nothing at all. I looked everywhere, even decided that if I found an image in one of the multitudes of books in our family library, I would cut it out (absolute sacrilege, nothing less, in our home). But there was nothing. I kept picturing a tiny cutout of a pig or a lamb. Nothing. National Geographic? Nothing.

As I stood facing one of the corners of my room, something in my peripheral vision moved. As I started to turn toward it, time slowed down. I saw that whatever it was, was fluttering slowly down, as though from the ceiling, and it was flat. Like something made out of paper. As it continued to fall, I made out that it was shaped like a cutout of a four-legged animal. I knew, without a doubt, that it was a tiny animal for my collage.

When it finished falling to the floor (it seemed to take ages, but was only a few seconds, I’m sure), I picked it up and turned it over. It was the image of a pig, cut out, in the manner of a paper doll without notches, from a magazine. It looked like it had been cut out much earlier, as there was a bit of wear around the edges. I knew what it was, and I knew what it was for, as easily as I knew my name or my phone number. But how? Why? I looked up to the place it had fallen from, and there was nothing there besides ceiling. I think at one point I even stood on a chair to see whether there were any strange cracks or crevices in the acoustic popcorn up there. Of course, there was nothing.

My collage was complete. And twenty years later, I still wonder.