A History of the Future Read Online Free PDF

cart empty except for a half inch of snow. Mandy spun Dennis around, reached up, and pulled his face down to hers, kissing him violently. His hands found their way inside her mackinaw jacket. She momentarily pulled herself away from his hungry mouth. His eyes opened stickily, as though he desperately wished to remain in the dreamy realm of unbidden romance. Her dark eyes drilled back at him with a gaze so fierce that it both frightened and excited him. She took off the backpack with baby Julian and leaned it against the tarpaulin-covered furniture. Julian had gone to sleep, his face smeared with ketchup. Mandy climbed into the cart’s cargo bed and lay on her back throwing her colorful skirt up and lifting her knees. Dennis followed avidly and lowered his trousers. He loomed above Mandy. A pair of black wings seemed to spread from behind him and his sharp-nosed face appeared suddenly birdlike as he moved to his exertions. In a little while he subsided, breathless, against her.
    “Disgusting whore,” Caym said.
    “What?” Mandy said.
    “I didn’t say anything. You’re lovely.”
    “I’m a whore.”
    “I have some money.”
    “No!”
    “Silver money.”
    At that moment, a back door to the tavern’s kitchen opened and out stepped Brother Enos, sixteen, one of the helpers in the kitchen, a bucket swinging from his arm. He waddled down three steps, lifted a square of plywood off a plastic barrel, and deposited a load of kitchen scraps among what would be tomorrow’s breakfast for the New Faith pigs. Returning to the kitchen door, Brother Enos with a sideward glance noticed Dennis and Mandy across the way in the cargo bed of the cart. Dennis was propped on one arm staring right at him. Mandy tried to turn her face away. Brother Enos did not linger. He waddled back through the door with his bucket more rapidly than he emerged.
    “Stupid, filthy girl!” Caym said. His voice was now like a loudspeaker inside her head. “Insect! Worthless piece of shit! Go home! Now!”
    Mandy struggled to draw her legs out from under Dennis.
    “Wait,” he whispered.
    “I can’t.”
    “Go home now or I will kill this man,” Caym said.
    Dennis unpinned her. She swung herself awkwardly out of the cart bed, hoisted the baby onto her back again, and hurried out of the courtyard through the alley, tears streaking her face. Propped up on one arm in the cart’s cargo bed, snowflakes alighting on his hair and woolly beard, Dennis watched her exit the alley. Every dozen steps Mandy broke into a run. Julian started crying again, too, as he bounced up and down on her back. Mandy just happened to be across Main Street from Einhorn’s store when the baby threw up and the warm vomit flowed down the back of her mackinaw jacket. Mandy stopped in her tracks, groaned, and struggled to squirm the backpack around so she could seize Julian.
    “Don’t you just hate him?” Caym said.
    Raging now, Mandy managed to hoist Julian up by his armpits and shook him violently several times, hissing, “Goddamn you!” through clenched teeth. The baby shrieked once sharply and then went silent. Across the street, Buddy Haseltine, the child-man who did chores in Einhorn’s store and lived in the back room, watched Mandy from the wicker chair on the porch where he had been counting snowflakes. He’d gotten to one hundred and two.
    “I just hate you!” Mandy said and shook Julian twice more on the words “just” and “hate,” but he was silent now. Buddy Haseltine, swaddled in wool clothing, had been balancing on the rear legs of the wicker chair with his own stumpy legs up on the porch rail, but he now let the chair down as he leaned forward to watch and it clattered audibly on the porch floor. Mandy glanced over at Buddy as she stuffed Julian back into the ash-splint pack. Buddy’s face was disposed in its usual way, mouth open and tongue protruding slightly like a small pink animal that lived in a cave, but his eyes appeared to register the