Creepy and Maud Read Online Free PDF

way photographs can capture a soul. Maybe the more I draw them, the more power I take from them. When I get time, I must draw Nancy.
     
    I draw people the way they look through-the-glass-dark-ly. Some of them are beautiful and some of them are not. I draw Creepy, but I would never tell him, or show him. From time to time, when I’m feeling sad, I draw myself reflected in his window, superimposed on him like a ghost, or a paper doll’s dress, with my gold wings and serpent belt. So he is looking at me and I am looking back at myself.
     
    I draw my mum’s face (she’s very pretty) and mydad’s hands. I draw them morphed together like one creature, face and hands and nothing else, because that is what I see. My mother’s face with just a soupçon of happiness wrapped tight in her frankness; my dad’s hands walloping out the sides of her head like Bullwinkle ears. Soupçon is French. It is a good word in the mouth. You have to say it like you have a mouth full of something. I like French. I used to like French.
     
    Coda: I wait for the light to fascinate me.
     

SEVEN

    The difference between Despair
    And Fear—is like the One
    Between the instant of a Wreck
    And when the Wreck has been—
    —Emily Dickinson, ‘305’ (1862)

    Sometimes I try to imagine what my parents were like when they were young. I know they were once young and at that time they had some sort of feeling for each other. This fascinates me. If it really was love, how long did that last? How long before they no longer wanted to be in the same photograph? Five years? Five minutes? Is there a little bit left in there somewhere? A smidgeon of kind feelings smeared like the skid marks I often see in Merrill’s whitey-tighties, the greasy remnant of a moresolid but now long removed reality? Okay, that’s pretty disgusting. But as far as similes go, it seems appropriate to me. Years ago, Mum used to scrub those skiddies with a nailbrush slathered in Sard. She doesn’t do that anymore. She just drops the soiled undies in with the rest of the wash. You might think this bothers me, but it doesn’t. One way or another, I’m going to end up with Dad’s shit all over me. This way it’s just on my clothes.
     
    How does a man get to the point in a relationship where he no longer believes he has to wipe his butt? I saw his butt once. He was shaving naked. I walked into the bathroom and there was Merrill in all his born glory, razor in his hand, glazed look on his face, and a veritable pelt peeking out from between his butt cheeks. It looked like he’d sat on a guinea pig. Poor Mum. Bet Dad always walked out of the bedroom backwards when he was with his mistress. If he even had a mistress. Shaving his bits is just the sort of thing Dad would do to get Mum’s attention.
     
    If I assume they did love each other once, that thought does more than fascinate me. It scares me a bit. Does everyone who loves end up training the family pet to be an attack dog? Stories about love hardly ever end up this way. A part of me still believes in the happy ending, in spite of everything. Maybe that’s just because I’m currently in love myself. Maybe things will bedifferent for me when the wreck has been.
     
    Maybe it’s not love at all that’s the culprit. Maybe it’s marriage. Maybe all those stories of love end with ‘and they lived happily ever after’ because no one can taunt their imagination into steering love’s ship away from the rocks. Steering love’s ship. That’s awful. The shit stain simile was much better. I mean, we’re not meant to be with just one person for the rest of our lives. Men are biochemically and genetically programmed to spread their seed, to seek out new partners in order to propagate the species. Aren’t we? That’s what Mrs Webster told us in Human Biology, anyway. She didn’t last long at our school.
     
    I love Maud but I would never tell her. It’s more than a secret, it’s a war wound. It’s deep and bloody and rotting