TheEarthAbides

The hammer—all the children associated it vaguely with something strange and mystical in the far past! ...Generally speaking, no one touched it except Ish... The children had come to think of it an implement of power, dangerous for any of them to touch. He could see how such an idea might have begun half seriously as a game and in a few years have come to be taken seriously. ...It could not be much work, Ish decided, to overcome this superstition. 

Yet that same afternoon he began to have doubts. On the sidewalk in front of the house some children were playing. As they played, they were jumping from one block of the sidewalk to another and crying out that old rhyme:

Step on a crack,
Break your mother's back!

- Earth Abides
George R. Stewart