Flannery O'Connor Makes Dirt Sound Good

Flannery O'Connor's "A View of the Woods" is a short story so delicious, it rivals William's Gay's "The Paperhanger." Here is how she handles the description of a grandfather and his granddaughter sitting on the bumper of his car while watching a machine lift out dirt and throw it in a pile:

"Any fool that would let a cow pasture interfere with progress is not on my books," he had said to Mary Fortune several times from his seat on the bumper, but the child did not have eyes for anything but the machine. She sat on the hood, looking down into the red pit, watching the big disembodied gullet gorge itself on the clay, then, with the sound of a deep sustained nausea and a slow mechanical revulsion, turn and spit it up. Her pale eyes behind her spectacles followed the repeated motion of it again and again and her face -- a small replica of the old man's -- never lost its look of complete absorption."

You can find Ms. O'Connor's story in her collection EVERYTHING THAT RISES MUST CONVERGE. Run and fetch it, quick!