Excerpt from In Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan

The Gentle Cricket

I went out and stood on the bridge for a while and looked down at the river below.  It was three feet wide.  There were a couple of statues standing in the water.  One of them was my mother.  She was a good woman.  I made it five years ago.

The other statue was a cricket.  I did not make that one.  Somebody else made it a long time ago in the time of the tigers.  It is a very gentle statue.

I like my bridge because it is made of all things: wood and the distant stones and gentle planks of watermelon sugar.

I walked down to iDEATH through a long cool twilight that passed like a tunnel over me.  I lost sight of iDEATH when I passed into the piney woods and the trees smelled cold and they were growing steadily darker.