When I was a boy I thought my grandmother’s nitro-glycerine tablets were amusing. Certainly at any moment my grandmother might explode. The fantasy (for that’s what it was) had more possibilities than those offered by mere prescription for she lived in a Victorian house filled with dynamite, a matter at once improbable and wickedly dangerous. About twice a year she’d go to the Laconia, New Hampshire Police Department and remind the good officers she had roughly 200 crates of TNT in her cellar, and twice a year the policemen patronized her with “yes, yes,” and “dear, dear” and “there, there” and that would be the end of it. But then the day came when she brought a box of decaying dynamite sticks into the station and plunked it down on the desk and said, “W.T. loved dynamite, and he left me a house crammed with the stuff, and he’s been gone a long time, Christ, for all I know he’s in Dynamiter’s Heaven. But dynamite decays Godammit, and the whole house is going to blow the next time somebody rings the doorbell!”
It was the doorbell that got their attention.
And so we sat around for a week, my grandmother popping nitro pills and smoking Kent cigarettes, the house creaking as it always did, the boxes of dynamite still as taxidermic bison, and the police nowhere in sight.
Planet of the Blind 