The Myth of Wile E

I'll Eat My Words

When I came to, I realized I'd been mistaken, way back when the mogul had first visited me. It seemed I did in fact have a gold mine buried beneath my house after all. And because of that gold mine, I would have just enough to take back my house from the mogul, and replace the windows, and patch the roof, and hire a team of folks with toilet plungers and mallets to bang my house back into more or less a rhombus. The mogul would just have to build his mall around me. When I woke up in the morning and yawned and stepped out my front door, instead of seeing trees, I would see a food court. When I went for a walk in what used to be the woods, I would find myself walking through department stores instead. Rather than walking up the hill to look down on the power plant, I would take an escalator to the second level and look down on gadget kiosks and a carousel and, seasonally, Santa's village.

Granted, I had no idea what I was going to eat when I was surrounded by a mall instead of a garden and trees. But I had thirty-nine apples—well, okay, somewhat fewer now—and that would just have to be enough to keep me going until whatever came next. I knew it would be enough, somehow.

And if I was wrong about that, I guess I'd eat my words.