Words That I Love/Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard's a wonderfully precise, excellently descriptive writer.  It's amazing how much she can see in even just a square inch of earth.  In a notebook from 1990 I copied out a passage from her An American Childhood.  Dillard, born in 1945, was about five, growing up in Pittsburgh, when:

In the leafy distance up Edgerton I could see a black phalanx.

It blocked the sidewalk; it rolled footlessly forward like a tank.

The nuns were coming.  They had no bodies, and imitation

faces.  I quitted the swing and banged through the back door

and ran to Mother in the kitchen.

I didn't know the nuns taught the children; the Catholic children

certainly avoided them on the streets, almost as much as I did.

The nuns seemed to be kept in St. Bede's as in a prison, where

their faces rotted away -- or they lived eyeless in the dark by

choice, like bats.  Parts of them were manufactured.  Other 

parts were made of mushrooms.

In the kitchen, Mother said it was time I got over this.  She took

me by the hand and hauled me back outside; we crossed the

street and caught up with the nuns.  "Excuse me," Mother said

to the black phalanx.  It wheeled around.  "Would you please

just say hello to my daughter here?  If you could just let her see

your faces."

I saw the white, conical billboards they had as mock-up heads;

I couldn't avoid seeing them, those white boards like pillories

with circles cut out and some bunched human flesh pressed like

raw pie crust into the holes.  Like mushrooms and engines, they

didn't have hands.  There was only that disconnected saucerful

of whitened human flesh at their tops.  The rest, concealed by a

chassis of soft cloth over hard cloth, was cylinders, drive shafts,

clean wiring, and wheels.

"Why, hello," some of the top parts said distinctly.  They teeter-

ed toward me.  I was delivered to my enemies, and had no place

to hide; I could only wail for my young life so unpityingly

snuffed.