So I bought a box of off-brand soda crackers. They were cheap: I figured—why not? And they were bad. So bad. I couldn't finish them. I tried them on the birds and the beasts, but no one would bite. Not even the raccoons. So there was nothing else to do: I dug for them a shallow grave, and laid their bodies down.

The good thing, about the bad crackers, is that, like Proust's madeleines, they sparked remembrances of things past. To wit: survival crackers. Placed by the government in the fallout shelters so that the Americans therein would have something to eat while they were Surviving the nuke rain falling outside. They came into my mouth when my friend D "liberated" them from the shelters around town and brought them into our house, so that when there was no money we would still have something to eat, and could thereby Survive.

They were twenty or thirty years old when I was digesting them, but seemed not to have suffered with the time; the taste was peculiar, but not unpleasant, certainly superior to these off-brand soda crackers I buried out there when not even the raccoons would eat them. The government had no doubt figured the Americans in the shelters would have to be in there Surviving for a very long time, and so designed the crackers to be more or less immortal. I believe they consisted primarily of bulgur, a word which sounds suspiciously Russian, and so shows that Rooskis were all in the Americans' government, even then.