Better Living Through Plastic Explosives Read Online Free PDF

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    Lucy, you got some ’splainin’ to do! How could he have explained? With that jaw grown so heavy it was now only good for mastication? With that tongue that most of us were certain had nimbly traced figure eights on our wives’ breasts and thighs, now thickened and barely contained in the bowl of his mouth? Trevor swears he pleaded. His eyes, buried under that shelf of brow, begged for understanding. Did he plead? Sometimes even the merest suggestion of what may have happened is enough to make you question your own recollections.
    As for Gido, what could we do? That dog had an exceptional sense of smell. And halfwit or not, that dog was loyal. Even now we’re not ashamed to admit that more than one of us wept. Karlheinz the longest and hardest.

    The mail continues to arrive at 2781, the bills get paid, even the mortgage, thanks to Trevor’s computer-hacking skills. Come tax time Stefan, a crackerjack accountant, will see to it that the former occupant doesn’t fall into arrears. We’ll make sure he sends his old mom, the only personal correspondent we could determine, a Christmas card.
    We razed the rampant growth on the property. The children have resumed playing in the trucks, and we’ve accepted that boys will be boys. The little Jesus fish on the Dodge Ram has sprouted rudimentary legs and a tail, clearly one of Stefan’s jokes, although he denies it. It’s so peaceful here on our cul-desac, at the edge of the ravine, that it’s difficult to recall that only two months ago we were engaged in what Patel has described as a Manichean struggle.
    The smell is something we’ve learned to live with, even Trevor. A kind of sufferance we must bear.
    Looking out our front windows we can see our wives, curbside, straddling their motorcycles, careful of their gently swelling bellies, revving their engines. The flash of late-October sun on chrome fenders, after all the rain we’ve had lately, could render a man blind.

ONCE, WE WERE SWEDES
    No one cared about the facts anymore. The facts were suspect, mutable as memory, as insubstantial as the off-gassing of the new polymer carpets in the classroom, their molecular composition resistant to the most persistent of stains: mustard, cherry Kool-Aid, blood. (Alex’s students had all shrugged when she asked if anyone else could smell the fumes that insinuated their way into her sinus cavities and then slumped there like a belligerent toddler, half-dressed and shrieking.)
    As for news, baby, these kids wouldn’t notice news if it kicked down their doors in the dull of the night and set their hair on fire.
    What they had were opinions. And in their opinion Journalism 100 badly sucked. Where was the equipment ? Where were the DVCPRO digital camcorders, the Avid XP editing suite, the chroma wall for weather, the skyline backdrop? And why do research for news stories when you could blog or tweet what you already knew? That the two “newsroom” printers were dot matrix was cause for much hilarity. The archetypical steno pad and rollerball pen, iconic to Alex, might as well have been the mandible fragments of an iguanodon.
    Who were they, these wounded children of the new diaspora with their burnt offerings of exploding car radiators and near rapes in strip-mall ATM lobbies as excuses? Who was forcing them to be here? One sallow boy with gaping nostrils had shown up last month, assignment incomplete as usual, his right hand swathed in gauze like a badly applied diaper. He held it up as if taking a citizenship oath, claiming second-degree burns. Three days later, Alex caught that same hand, unscathed save for its tattooed knuckles, giving her the finger as she wrote, yet again, on the whiteboard: Who, What, Where, When, and Why?
    What she should have written: Why bother?
    She tried to channel empathy—these were kids whose older brothers were being gunned down gangland-style in the driveways of their parents’ suburban