er intended to be pulled through a thicket of piano wire.

Getting dressed was something else. I caught my heel in one trouser leg
and shredded the cloth. I broke the buckle on my belt. My shoelaces went
like parting a length of wet spaghetti. The button on the top of my
shirt pinched off and when I gave that final jerk to my necktie it
pulled the knot down into something about the size of a pea.

Breakfast was very pleasant, although I bent the fork tines spearing a
rasher of bacon and removed the handle of my coffee cup without half
trying. After breakfast I discovered that I could not remove a cigarette
from the package without pinching the end down flat, and after I
succeeded in getting one into my mouth by treating both smoke and match
as if they were made of tissue paper, my first drag on the smoke lit a
howling furnace-fire on the end that consumed half of the cigarette in
the first puff.

"You're going to take some school before you are fit to walk among
normal people, Steve," said Gloria with amused interest.

"You're informing me?" I asked with some dismay, eyeing the wreckage
left in my wake. Compared to the New Steve Cornell, the famous bull in
the china shop was Gentle Ferdinand. I picked up the cigarette package
again; it squoze down even though I tried to treat it gentle; I felt
like Lenny, pinching the head off of the mouse. I also felt about as
much of a bumbling idiot as Lenny, too.

My re-education went on before, through, and after breakfast. I
manhandled old books from the attic. I shredded newspapers. I ruined
some more lead pencils and finally broke the pencil sharpener to boot. I
put an elbow through the middle panel of the kitchen door without even
feeling it and then managed to twist off the door knob. Generally
operating like a one-man army of vandals, I laid waste to the Farrow
home.

Having thus ruined a nice house, Gloria decided to try my strength on
her car. I was much too fast and too hard on the brakes, which of course
was not too bad because my foot was also too insensitive on the
go-pedal. We took off like a rocket being launched and then I tromped on
the brakes (Bending the pedal) which brought us down sharp like hitting
a haystack. This allowed our heads to catch up with the rest of us; I'm
sure that if we'd been normal-bodied human beings we'd have had our
spines snapped. Eventually I learned that everything had to be handled
as if it were tissue paper, and gradually re-adjus