Old Woman on the Subway

In Old Woman on the Subway we see the old woman seated on a moving subway car with flashing lights and hear occasional muted subway rattling.  She tells us that “we” have God tied up in the back yard with a long chain.  He snarls and growls and slobbers but the chain yanks him back hard.  She says if he ever gets loose he will “mess you up good.”  She tells us her second husband used to mess her up pretty good and now she can hear the radio stations on Mars on a rainy night.   She says the Devil lived in a big clock above the ice cream parlor in her home town and would come out at night and eat up your dog or your children or bite you bad on the leg.  The Devil has spikes on his penis that make you howl but then he bites your throat and blood gushes out.  She says the preacher back home had a penis like a cheese log but he got run over by a street car and they saved the penis for a door stop.  She likes the Martian radio broadcasts but the medicine the doctor gave her to help her think more clearly interfered with the broadcasts so she gave the medicine to the paper boy.  Doctors just torture you until all your money is gone and then they kill you, just like her third husband.  She wants to be buried in a telephone booth in case she needs to make some phone calls.  When she gets home, she says, she has to feed God raw meat.  She keeps him chained up to lure the Devil who has been after her all her life.  The Devil sits just out of range of God’s chain and torments him.  Maybe one day she will let God loose and he’ll bite the Devil in the crotch.  Sometimes she dreams about her baby but she has learned from the mice running around in the ceiling that you have to make sacrifices if you’re going to achieve anything in life.  When she gets home at night the house is empty and she feels sad.  But she looks out at God chewing on a bone and his eyes are gleaming.  He’s waiting.