I ran up to the ad and, to the astonishment I suspect of everyone on the platform hurrying home that night, blew a couple of kisses at it. That was my story, I knew immediately.
And by the time I reached my house in Sea Gate at the Coney Island tip of Brooklyn, I had worked it out almost completely.
Ever since my boyhood, I had been fascinated by the Indian story—or the many Indian stories, perhaps I should say. When I was a kid and my gang played Cowboys and Indians, I always insisted on being one of the Indians. I did it partly out of a partiality for the exotic, but mostly out of a kind of an apology.
What was I apologizing for? I’m not sure. Possibly for what my people had done to them. (My people? My people came from ghettos in Poland and Lithuania! Oh, well, maybe my people, the Cowboys.)
I swallowed the supper Fruma had prepared for me and rushed to my typewriter. I began typing almost immediately.
I stopped only to go to the bathroom. By the time dawn broke over the end of the boardwalk, the story was done.
It needed very little rewriting, and once I did that, the piece came to sixty-four hundred words almost exactly. For a title, I went back to a book by a writer whose work I had loved since the age of twelve, Charles Kingsley, the vicar of Eversley. And I had a story that was science fiction and also what I liked to write those days—a moral tale. I decided that I too adored Jewish rye.
Bob Mills liked it too, the story, not the bread. And I’ve always been quite fond of what I call my science-fiction western.
Written 1957 / Published 1958