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 Posted: Sun Aug 18, 2013 8:51 pm
"Why are you out here?" "Loaded question." "Well I mean. You're smart. Your family has money." "I'm researching a Great American Novel. It's called Anonymous. It's about the plight of the American poor." She snorts. She is painting sunflowers on the wall of the alley where she'd found him sleeping, all skinny legs bent up like a frog's, and he watches her draw. This is the second time she's done this but this time she does it while he watches. He hadn't liked waking up to small comforts because it implied permanence. There is a bruise on her neck. "You're a strange ********' person," he says. "You smell like a dead raccoon," she answers calmly. "Fair enough," he says. She is his best friend, his only friend. She liberates carousel horses and she tells him what the pigeons dream. She is insane, even more insane than he is, because only an insane person would befriend him now.
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Posted: Sun Aug 18, 2013 8:53 pm
"You've been doing so well, honey," his mother says, watching him test the baby's bottle on the inside of his wrist. She is so proud of him. "Even with April gone."
He's wearing his sleeves rolled down under his elbow again. She hasn't noticed yet.
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Posted: Sun Aug 18, 2013 8:54 pm
He is lying in bed and even though April can't really hear the music when she sleeps, she says the constant murmur is helpful, soothing, and he's gotten accustomed to it. Whatever part of him should have been wired up to appreciate music had failed, so it is nothing more than background noise, but he recognizes the song as something she plays frequently and occasionally sings to him adorably off-key.
He is nearly asleep again when the bathroom door reopens and she returns to sit down on the edge of the bed, and for a moment he knows that the smile he gives her is the dopey drunk-dog smile of absolute, stupid infatuation, and he doesn't care. She draws her knees up to her chest. Her toenails are painted with the tiniest of flowers.
"---" she whispers (the name distorted like it's being spoken underwater), and her voice is not what he expects. It is fragile and terrified, and he lifts himself onto an elbow.
"What's wrong?"
"Don't be mad at me," she whispers, and the skin on the back of his neck prickles.
"Why would I be mad at you?"
"---" she says, and her voice breaks, and her face is contorted by sudden tears. "I have something I need to tell you."
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Posted: Sun Aug 18, 2013 8:55 pm
He sees things. Sometimes his sister says she sees them too. Tonight it is a dog whose shadow is too big, and too hairy, and too feral. The dog is loping along the empty street while he walks back from the sleepover he'd bailed out of, and when it turns to look at him its grin is human, weird, and full of teeth.
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Posted: Sun Aug 18, 2013 8:56 pm
"Because I didn't ******** ask you to improve my 'living quarters,'" he sneers, his hand around her throat, and she is staring at him with eyes that aren't afraid, huge outsized lemuroid eyes too big for her face that are defiant and sad and disappointed but are not afraid of him. "I didn't ask you to make it ********' homey, did I?"
He shoves her away into the wall and he hopes it hurts and he hopes that scares her, and she is rubbing her neck and watching him with tears on her eyelashes while he scrapes the sunflowers off the bricks.
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Posted: Sun Aug 18, 2013 8:56 pm
People notice a single man with a baby, especially a man who looks like he does. But he is barely aware of the skeptical eyes, and he is clutching Tuesday maybe a little too tightly but she is sleeping, thank god she is sleeping, thank god, how can she sleep through the pounding of his heart because every time he is out, now, it seems like the shadows move in ways that shadows should not. The tall man with the stretched-out shadow says something to him that is not English and he thinks may not be human, and he walks faster, and Tuesday feels tiny and vulnerable in his arms but they will have to go through him if they want to hurt her.
They'll have to go through him, he thinks bitterly, like he's any kind of barrier at all.
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Posted: Sun Aug 18, 2013 8:56 pm
The guy looks like he stepped out of a Conan the Barbarian novel and he's covered in scars and tattoos and he's wearing some weird-a** s**t but he looks like he could wipe the floor with him and not think twice about it and possibly even enjoy it.
And he's scared of him, but he's more scared of the clipboard in his hands and everything that might be on it that he can't see.
He sizes him up. He mentally circles him like a snappish stray dog circling a rival.
He bristles. He's scared of him but he won't put his tail between his legs.
"Give me whatever you're arming me with and tell me where to stand."
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Posted: Sun Aug 18, 2013 8:56 pm
We've heard interesting things about your... hallucinations.
Every man's dream is to have his ********' insanity discussed behind his back as a novelty.
No. Not insanity, and not a novelty. This is more common than you think.
(They are not mocking him. They are not concerned. They are calm and collected and they look at him like he is a valuable find. They are bureaucracy and efficiency and perhaps a little bit of manic devotion and madness but they seem to know more than he does, and he lets them talk, and he will end up going with them, but there's something he has to do first.)
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Posted: Sun Aug 18, 2013 8:57 pm
He offers Harley a smoke.
She looks at him like he is crazy.
I'll tell mom, she says.
No you won't, he laughs, and he is right.
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Posted: Sun Aug 18, 2013 8:57 pm
He's blinking in the lights of his cellphone screen and his head is pounding but it works. He's checked it four times.
He needs to sleep. His hands are shaky. But he can't resist, embarrassing though it is, showing off a little.
He texts Gale. Like a dog wanting a pat on the head, he thinks with disgust.
He will make himself useful here, until they feed him to the dragons.
Werewolves and demons and shadows and mortality and futility. Coffee or tea, asks Gale.
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Posted: Sun Aug 18, 2013 8:57 pm
It's been twenty-one days since April disappeared and Tuesday is at home with his mother when he runs into an old friend on the street who offers him a hit for old time's sake.
He says yes.
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Posted: Sun Aug 18, 2013 8:58 pm
His uncle has confident hands that are always occupied and never fidgeting, and his uncle is never nervous. He wears sleek jackets and drives a sleek car, and he smokes.
His uncle's jacket is hanging on the back of a chair, and no one is looking. He gingerly, heart racing, extracts a box of cigarettes--Camel Lights--and pulls one out. He has matches. He slips out behind the garage.
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Posted: Sun Aug 18, 2013 8:58 pm
"---" says Alex, and the name is watery and indecipherable, "reading a dictionary like it's a bestseller."
He lifts his middle finger and turns the page without looking up, and Alex laughs and laughs.
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Posted: Sun Aug 18, 2013 8:59 pm
She asks him if he can blow smoke rings, Alice peeping over the edge of the mushroom all long blonde-and-pink curls and skeptical eyes and an expression when she looks at him that makes his fingers curl into a fist. He tries, but it's feeble with the thin light smoke, so he does a waterfall instead and he is ashamed at how gratified he is when she looks impressed.
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Posted: Sun Aug 18, 2013 8:59 pm
you're a good dog you're a good dog, i'm sorry malachi will take care of you he was always better at that than me be a good boy you're the only one i'm saying goodbye to because youre the only one who cant beg me to stay here you can't tell them where i'm going be a good boy and take care of tuesday
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