Don't Cry: Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

hoping they’d report something grisly,” you say to your friends, who chuckle at your lighthearted acknowledgment of hypocrisy.
    And they did report something grisly: the grandparents of the murdered girl who wanted to know what only the murderer could tell them. You picture the grandmother’s gentle wrinkled chest, a thick strip of flesh pulled away to reveal an unexpected passage to hell in her heart.
    •Then you have the marathon woman right underneath, smiling like an evangelist, her organs open for a thousand. An especially grotty sort of pie-eating contest, placed right beneath the killer, the pure vulnerability of an open body juxtaposed against the pure force of destruction. Why would a woman do that? What do her inane words really mean? Will she select the thousand? Is there at least a screening process? Or is it just anyone who shows up? If he had not been arrested, could the killer himself have mounted her along with everybody else? If she had discovered who he was, would that have been okay with her? Would she have just swallowed him without a burp?
    You picture her at the start of her ordeal, parting a curtain to appear before the crowd, muscular, oiled, coifed, dressed in a lame bathing suit with holes cut in the titties and crotch. She would turn and bend to show the suit-had been cut there, too. She would “ring-walk” before the bed, not like a stripper, more like a pro wrestler, striking stylized sex poses, flexing the muscles of her belly and thighs, gesticulating with mock anger, making terrible penis-busting faces.
    Might the killer enjoy this spectacle if he could watch it on TV? He may be a destroyer of women, but his victims were regular, human-style women: a concerned mother trying to connect with her daughter on a road trip in nature—the trip that delivered them into the hands of the killer. You picture the mother reading Reviving Ophelia the night before they left, frowning slightly as she thinks of the teenage boy years ago who fucked her mouth and then took her to dinner at Pizza Hut, thinks also of her daughter’s coed sleepover last week. Getting out of bed to use the bathroom with only the hall light on, peeing in gentle darkness, remembering: Grown-up pee used to smell so bad to her, and now the smell is just another welcome personal issue of her hardworking body, tough and fleshy in middle age, safe under her old flowered gown. The daughter is awake, too, and reading Wuthering Heights. She is thirteen, and she is irritated that the author has such sympathy for Heathcliff, who abuses his wife and child. What does it mean that he is capable of such passionate love? Is this realistic, or were people just dumber and more romantic back then? She doesn’t think that the mean people she knows are the most passionate; they just want to laugh at everything. But then she remembers that she laughed when a boy in class played a joke on an ugly girl and made her cry. Sighing, she puts the book down and lies on her back, her arm thrown luxuriantly over her head. On the ceiling, there are the beautiful shadows of slim branches and leaves. She does not really want to take this trip with her mother. Her mother tries so hard to help her and to protect her, and she finds this embarrassing. It makes her want to protect her mother, and that feeling is uncomfortable, too. She rolls on her side and picks up the book again.
    Thought and feeling, flesh and electricity; ordinary yet complex personalities, the like of which the killer had found impossible to maintain inside himself from the moment of his birth—and yet which he could erase with the strange, compulsive pleasure of an autistic child banging his head on the wall. You picture him as a little boy alone in an empty room, head subtly inclined, as if he is listening intently for a special sound. In the top drawer of his dresser, there are rows of embalmed mice stacked neatly atop one another. At age twelve, he has killed many animals besides mice,