All My Friends Are Superheroes Read Online Free PDF Page B

ahead.
    ‘See me!’ Tom screamed. He waved his hands in front of her face. He pushed the kitchen table away. The Perfectionist reached down. She took hold of a glass that wasn’t there, raised her arm and drank from her empty hand.
    Tom opened a cupboard. He took out a dinner plate. Raising it over his head, Tom let it fall. The plate shattered.
    The Perfectionist didn’t look up.
    Tom dropped another plate. The Perfectionist stared at the wall in front of her. Tom threw a plate into the wall she stared at. The Perfectionist didn’t look up. Tom reached to the back of the cupboard. He stacked all the remaining plates.
    ‘Look at me!’ he screamed. He lifted the stack over his head and his housecoat bunched up under his arms.
    The Perfectionist didn’t look at him.
    Tom dropped the plates. They hit the floor and shattered into countless bits. The Perfectionist got up from the kitchen table and set her imaginary glass in the sink. She stepped on the bits of broken plate and cut her feet to ribbons. She didn’t say a word. She tracked blood all the way to the bedroom.
    Tom discovered that touching her feet made her seasick. The Perfectionist threw up into a bowl as he pulled slivers of china out of her feet. He washed her feet. He bandaged them and slept on the floor.
    In seat F 27 the Perfectionist continues snoring. Tom puts his head in his hands. He leans forward, reaches into the pocket of the seat in front of him and pulls the plastic off a pair of headphones. He plugs them in. The last passenger left the volume at nine and opera plays so loud he can hear it with the headphones still on his lap.
    Tom looks at the headphones. He can hear the music, but he can’t see it. ‘If music is invisible, can being invisible be all bad?’ Tom thinks to himself.
    Tom unplugs the headphones. He puts them back into the pocket of the seat in front of him.

NINE

SIX HUNDRED CIGARETTES LATER
    One morning exactly five months after their wedding, the Perfectionist woke up even earlier than usual. She walked to her corner store to buy a package of cigarettes but when she got to the counter she hesitated. She asked for three cartons of cigarettes and bought a pink disposable lighter as well. From the corner store she walked to a thrift store where for $3.99 she bought the largest ashtray they had.
    In the same plastic bag she carried the cigarettes, the ashtray and the pink plastic lighter back to the apartment. She upended the plastic bag on the kitchen table, the ashtray wobbling as it hit the tabletop.
    Using a letter opener she unwrapped the three cartons of cigarettes. She took the plastic covering off the twenty-fourpackages. She took all the cigarettes out of their packages and made a stack of 600 cigarettes.
    The Perfectionist started smoking. Six hundred seemed like an incredible number of cigarettes to her. She was sure Tom would return before she smoked the last one.
    Twelve days later the 600th cigarette was between her nicotine-stained fingers. The plastic pink lighter was slippery in her hand. Her thumb flicked. She pushed the flame into the tip of the cigarette. She inhaled, didn’t cough, and somebody knocked on her door.
    The Perfectionist exhaled. She set the lit cigarette on the edge of the ashtray. On the way to the door her inner voice said not to open it. ‘He wouldn’t knock,’ it told her. She opened the door anyway.
    The man who stood in front of her was tall. His hair was freshly cut and greying at the temples. His black suit, white shirt and black tie were pressed. His shoes shone. Beside him on the sidewalk was a sample case big enough to hold a vacuum cleaner. He smiled at the Perfectionist.
    The Perfectionist has always hated vacuum salesmen. There’s no reason, no traumatic episode in her past, no exlover or absent father who is one. She just doesn’t like them.
    ‘I don’t want a vacuum,’ the Perfectionist said.
    ‘I’m not selling vacuums,’ he answered. His voice was lyrical, calm and