Flings Read Online Free PDF Page A

holding back a sneeze, and then all of a sudden I’m losing hold, have lost it, am making a noise that’s half donkey bray and half kicked cat. My whole body shudders with the force of it, snot all over my face, the suit rocking slightly from side to side on the metal hoop sewn beneath the fur of the mushroom cap’s rim.
    The good news is that observing this physics lesson seems to have given Melissa/Jessica an idea. “I’ve like totally got this,” she says, and rolls me over on my rim so I’m facing downward, suspended two feet above the earth, watching ants march across the concrete in my shadow while gravity, happily, works some of this snot off my face. Melissa/Jessica digs around in the fur of the mushroom stem, searching for the industrial-gauge zipper, which is located exactly where I’d never be able to reach it even if the suit had arms. She unzips me in one long quick pull, like it’s prom night and she’s me and I’m the best she could get.
    With my newly expanded range of motion I wriggle an arm free, wipe my face off with my hand, wipe my hand off on the grille mesh, then stand up and step out. The suit is splayed open on the ground like a butchered animal, a husked chrysalis, an egg sac from which I’m emerging, a born or reborn creature, baffled by the sunlight, covered head to toe in slime.
    (When you go steady with a poetry prof for as long as I did, you can’t help learning a few things about poetry, so don’t go getting incredulous—or, worse yet, impressed—that I talk so much less dumb than I live.)
    We can’t leave the suit where it’s fallen, so I throw my arms around its dead weight, heave, and lift. It’s not especially heavy—thirty pounds at a guess, maybe forty—or difficult to maneuver, provided of course that you aren’t straitjacketed inside it.
    I come back inside with the suit in a fireman’s carry, having refused Melissa/Jessica’s offers of assistance (and also having failed to learn or relearn her name). I march it right through the dining room and the kitchen, on back to the supply closet. I drop it on the floor in the corner, give it a few kicks and a stream of curses, and when I turn around she’s standing there holding a large Sprite with extra ice in one hand and a clean shirt in the other. The shirt is a size too small and has already had its neck V’d. “All I could find,” she says.
    â€œWhere the fuck is Ethan?”
    â€œHaven’t seen him.”
    Deep breaths. I’m taking deep breaths. First in for three whole seconds, then three seconds of stillness, then three seconds to exhale. I had planned to end this day with another raise for what I’ve been through, but the experience will be worthless in the retelling; it will sound like mere slapstick to Ethan, and that’s assuming he’s able to follow the plot.
    I take my shirt off and drop-kick it toward the mushroom suit, pick a dishrag from the reserve stash we keep back here, start to wipe myself dry. She watches me do all this, following the movement of the cloth up and down my body with her eyes. Well, why not? I’ve got good definition. My momentary weakness in the preceding episode was strictly the product of circumstance, the heat index and smothering getup. In the normal course of things I set an example of rude health in the enviable young-Whitmanic sense. What I mean is, it’s no surprise that this chick’s scoping me, even though my hair gel evaporated while I was frying in the suit.
    When I’m clean and crammed into the new shirt, I look at her and see she’s still looking. “This is for you, too,” she says, handing me the Sprite. Then she mumbles something about needing to get back out on the floor, which is understandable. This fiasco’s been unfolding for half an hour already, and the girl works for tips.
    I drink half the Sprite, then pour Svedka into