promising to send postcards

The family sat around the breakfast table eating ostrich eggs and pickle relish. "Please pass the used motor oil," asked Mother. "Please drown yourself in a vat of boiling monkey urine," said Sister to Brother. "I'm rubber and you're glue," said Grandmother to Pasty, the family's pet fly strip. "Are you quite finished with my eggs," asked the annoyed ostrich. Father sat in his customary seat, reading the backs of cereal boxes and sobbing. "The puzzles, the puzzles," he muttered, but no one paid attention.

Some time later, in a terrible fit of anger, Pasty ran away from home in a violent windstorm, promising to send postcards back home to her "family of schmucks," yet she was blown into a cinder block wall at a nearby gas station where she stuck to an ancient metallic sign advertising Phil's Soothing Foot Wart Pads. There she stayed, in good weather and bad, thinking of Father sobbing, his chest heaving, the end of his nose dripping snot.