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It is usually here in the telling of the tale to his children that a
dramatically-inclined father would pause, fold his hands and say, “Well,
goodnight sweet ones, we'll finish the story tomorrow night.” And which point
the sweet ones would become sour and shout in protest, “No, no, finish the
story now! We can't wait! We want to know what happens to poor Damiano.
Does he get eaten? Was he too late?” The father then has two choices, of
course: continue on with the story, or stand his ground as a parent with rules
and a steadily reliable bedtime on which pliable and receptive children learn to
base their burgeoning foundations of sturdy dependable lives. It's also a
question, too, of gluttony. Do you eat the entire rack of lamb in one sitting
because it's hot, fresh and at its most delicious, with a foreknowledge that
you'll have none left for the morrow? Or do you instead parcel out your
enjoyment over the course of several occasions, thereby multiplying your
pleasurable experiences? Many very promising children have become very
miserable adults all because their fathers fed them the entirety of a bedtime
story in one sitting, keeping them up late, thus depriving them of a sense of
reliability and constancy, all for the sake of momentary pleasure, and causing
them never fully to believe in their adult lives that events and experiments are
repeatable and measurable. To be fair to the men who ruin their children
thusly, there is an entirely different class of men on the entire opposite end of
town who make entirely other choices such as stopping the story at this point,
finishing it the following evening, whose children were so tormented with
nightmares of poor Damiano being eaten that they were so exhausted the next
day they staggered and stumbled in front of the ox and plow and were trampled
to death. Fortunately, neither is the scenario here. There is no father; there
are no children, and there has not been this paragraph of interruption in the
storytelling.

Damiano saw immediately that beside Kinderslüka, there were two other
children in the grotto, waiting to be eaten next. This meant, of course, that
there would be little motivation for Kinderslüka to go running after Damiano.

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