The Oyster Catastrophe
A restaurant diner faces a terrifying and slippery ordeal when a raw oyster takes a wrong turn.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Last night a fat man sat down to a table in a Clark street restaurant and called for a plate of raw oysters. He harpooned a fat one with his fork, but the slippery bivalve dropped off, carromed on his chin, and slid down inside his shirt. He felt that something had happened, and that he had arrived at a crisis in his life. The oyster shied upward and across the man’s wide expanse of palpitating bosom, leaving a trail of arctic rigidity in its wake, and took up new quarters in his left armpit. The man leaped two feet in the air, yelling like a wild west Indian. The oyster got excited, scooted here and there like a streak of greased lightning, and finally took up a position under a short rib near the spine. When the victim finally struck the floor in his agony, the oyster shot out of the back of his neck like a bullet, hit the ceiling with a squashy plonk, and hung limp from the chandelier.
“The oyster shot out of the back of his neck like a bullet, hit the ceiling with a squashy plonk, and then fell back and hung limp.”
A classic piece of 'funny page' journalism, capturing the absurd physical comedy that was a staple of late 19th-century regional newspapers.
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