Choke Read Online Free PDF

things than working with your best friend.
    Sort-of best friend.
    Still, you’d think this would be more fun, a fun job with a bunch of Drama Club types and community theater folks. Not this chain gang of throwbacks. These Puritan hypocrites.
    If the Ye Old Town Council only knew Mistress Plain, the seamstress, is a needle freak. The miller is cooking crystal meth. The innkeeper deals acid to the busloads of bored teenagers who get dragged here on school field trips. These kids sit in rapt attention watching while Mistress Halloway cards wool and spins it into yarn, the whole time she’s lecturing them on sheep reproduction and eating hashish johnnycake. These people, the potter on methadone, the glassblower on Percodans, and the silversmith popping Vicodins, they’ve found their niche. The stableboy, hiding his headphones under a tricorner hat, plugged in on Special K and twitching to his own private rave, they’re all a bunch of hippie burnouts peddling their agrarian bullshit, but okay, that’s just my opinion.
    Even Farmer Reldon has his plot of primo weed out behind the corn and the pole beans and junk. Only he calls it hemp.
    The only funny part about Colonial Dunsboro is maybe it’s too authentic, but for all the wrong reasons. This whole crowd of losers and nutcases who hide out here because they can’t make it in the real world, in real jobs—isn’t this why we left England in the first place? To establish our own alternate reality. Weren’t thePilgrims pretty much the crackpots of their time? For sure, instead of just wanting to believe something different about God’s love, the losers I work with want to find salvation through compulsive behaviors.
    Or through little power and humiliation games. Witness His Lord High Charlie behind lace curtains, just some failed drama major. Here, he’s the law, watching whoever gets bent over, yanking his dog with one white-gloved hand. For sure, they don’t teach you this in history class, but in colonial times, the person who got left in the stocks overnight was nothing less than fair game for everybody to nail. Men or women, anybody bent over had no way of knowing who was doing the ram job, and this was the real reason you never wanted to end up here unless you had a family member or a friend who’d stand with you the whole time. To protect you. To watch your ass, for real.
    “Dude,” Denny says. “It’s my pants, again.”
    So I pull them back up.
    The rain’s wet Denny’s shirt flat to his skinny back so the bones of his shoulders and the trail of his spine show through, even whiter than the unbleached cotton material. The mud’s up around the tops of his wooden clogs and spilling in. Even with my hat on, my coat’s getting soaked, and the damp makes my dog and dice all wadded up in the crotch of my wool breeches start to itch. Even the crippled chickens have clucked off to find somewhere dry.
    “Dude,” Denny says, and sniffs. “For serious, you don’t have to stay.”
    From what I remember about physical diagnosis, Denny’s pallor could mean liver tumors.
    See also: Leukemia.
    See also: Pulmonary edema.
    It starts raining harder, from clouds so dark that people startlighting lamps inside. Smoke settles down on us from chimneys. The tourists will all be in the tavern drinking Australian ale out of pewter mugs made in Indonesia. In the woodwright’s shop, the cabinetmaker will be huffing glue out of a paper bag with the blacksmith and the midwife while she talks about fronting the band they dream of putting together but never will.
    We’re all trapped. It’s always 1734. All of us, we’re stuck in the same time capsule, the same as those television shows where the same people are marooned on the same desert island for thirty seasons and never age or escape. They just wear more makeup. In a creepy way, those shows are maybe too authentic.
    In a creepy way, I can see myself standing here for the rest of my life. It’s a comfort, me and Denny