Don't Cry: Stories Read Online Free PDF

but he embalms only the mice because uniformity satisfies him. He likes embalming because it is clean, methodical, and permanent. He likes his mind to be uniform and inflexible as a grid. Below the grid is like the life of animals—sensate and unbearably deep.
    There are people who believe that serial killers are a "fundamental force of nature,” a belief that would be very appealing to the killer. Yes, he would say to himself, that is me. I am fundamental! But the marathon woman on TV would be fundamental, too. She would not show her personality, and even if she did, nobody would see it; they would be too distracted by the thought of a mechanical cunt, endlessly absorbing discharge. However, with her lame bathing suit and her camp ring walk, appealing to everyone’s sense of fun, she would be the fundamental female as comedy: The killer could sit comfortably in the audience and laugh, enjoying this appearance of his feminine colleague. Maybe he would feel such comfort that he would stand and come forward, unbuckling his pants with the flushed air of a modest person finally coming up to give testimony. Safe in her sweating, loose, and very wet embrace, surrounded by the dense energy of many men, his penis could tell her the secret story of murder right in front of everyone. Her worn vagina would hold the killer like it had held the husband and the lover and the sharpie and the father and the nitwit and every other man, his terrible story a tiny, burning star in the right-ful firmament of her female vastness.
    Hell, yes, she would “show what women can do”!
    In the context of this dreadfiil humanity, you think, The poor turtles! They do not deserve to be on the same page with these people! You think of them making their stoic way across a pebbled beach, their craning necks wrinkled and diligent, their bodies a secret even they cannot lick or scratch. The murdered woman, in moments of great tenderness for her husband, would put her hands on his thighs and kiss him on his balls and say to him, “Secret Paul.” She didn’t mean that his balls were a secret She meant that she was kissing the part of him that no one knew except her, and that the vulnerability of his balls made her feel this part acutely. That is the kind of secret the turtles are, even to themselves.
    But now all natural secrets have been exposed, and it is likely the turtles have been sold to laboratory scientists who want to remove their shells so that they can wire electrodes to the turtles’ skin in order to monitor their increasing terror at the loss of their shells. You think, This idea is absurd and grotesque. It isn’t even possible to remove a turtle’s shell without killing it! Yet with science, anything is possible. With science, rats have been tortured by electroshock each time they press a lever to get a food pellet. Rabbits have been injected with cancerous cells and then divided into control groups, one of which was petted and the other not, in order to investigate the role of affection in healing. Scientists do these experiments because they want to help. They want to alleviate physical suffering; they want to eradicate depression. To achieve their goal, they will take everything apart and put it back together a different way. They want heaven and they will go to hell to get there.
    But still, there is grace. Before the mother met the murderer, her vagina had been gently parted and kissed many times. Her daughter had exposed her own vagina before her flowered cardboard mirror (bought at Target and pushpinned to the wall), regarding her organs with pleased wonder, thinking, This is what I have.
    And maybe the turtles were not kidnapped, but rescued: There are actually preserves for turtles, special parks where people can take turtles they haye found or grown tired of, or rescued from the polluted, fetid fish tanks of uncaring neighbors. Or maybe they were simply set free near the water, wading forward together as the zoo spokesman had