Girls Fall Down Read Online Free PDF

your coat down here, and take a seat in that chair? Thanks.’ He checked the lights and adjusted his lens. ‘I’ll take some pictures of your arms first. Could you lift up your right arm?’ He adjusted the lens, focused and clicked off a few shots. ‘You’re Christine, right?’
    â€˜Yeah,’ muttered the girl.
    â€˜How are you feeling today, Christine? Bit under the weather?’
    â€˜Kind of.’
    â€˜Left arm now? Great, thank you. What happened? Allergies?’
    â€˜I was
poisoned
,’ said the girl in a sudden rush of emotion. ‘Somebody
poisoned
me.’
    â€˜It was on the subway,’ said the mother, controlled anger in her voice. ‘It was just like those girls on the news. Someone’s got to do something about this.’
    â€˜Huh.’ Alex took a step back and looked at the girl, her limp hair and red-rimmed eyes. ‘Well, let’s just get these photos for the record, and we’ll see what the doctors have to say. I’m going to do a couple of profiles and then some pictures facing me, okay? So first I need you to turn your head to the right. Perfect.’
    The sleet was coming down again. Alex wrapped his scarf around his face and bent his head, walking into the wind as the frozen rain rattled on shop windows, the tiny ice pellets not melting but clustering on the sidewalk, bright and slick. The wind rose and tugged at his coat, stinging the tips of his ears, as he crossed the broad intersection towards the subway and descended into the damp cold of the tunnels. The subway car was crowded, thick heat issuing from the radiators and from the bodies that pressed against him as he stood, grasping a metal ring, drowsing standing up.
    In the faint elastic time of half-sleep, he thought of the falling girls, and though he didn’t for a moment believe it, he began shaping in his mind a story, a man who stepped onto the train with a package. Let him be a tall man, and good-looking, and educated. He must be a man with some scientific training. He could be a chemist, say; but in this story he would be a doctor. The doctor steps onto the train with a package wrapped in newspaper. He carries it as tenderly as if it were a damaged child, resting it gently on his knee as he sits.
    Motive was not a question that Alex in his waking dream considered in detail, but he did not think the man was acting out of anger. The man believes, at any rate, that he is acting out of something like love.
    At a particular stop, the man places his package unobtrusively on the floor of the subway car, just beneath his seat. The movement issmooth and subtle. The package lies on the metal floor among shoes and dust.
    At another particular stop, chosen long in advance, the man, the doctor, rises from his seat and picks up his folded umbrella. Quietly, swiftly, he stabs the package three times with the umbrella’s sharpened tip. The train comes to a halt, the doors open, and the doctor moves swiftly out the door. An invisible twine of gas curls upwards.
    The doctor watches the train pull out, and contemplates the end of the world.
    At College station, Alex shook himself awake and joined the flow upwards to the streetcar stop. The car that arrived from the east emptied itself onto the street, and he found a seat by the window, rubbed his face with his hands and watched the lines of stores and office buildings gliding past.
    When he was climbing down from the car near his apartment, he realized that the floaters were gone. It meant nothing, really, it signified no long-term hope, but he felt some of his fatigue lifting, his body not quite so heavy. He blinked, and breathed deeply in the metallic air, and crossed the street, the end of the world held off for now.
    Queen Jane dropped off the couch in a slow jump, forelegs and then back legs in separate movements, as he walked in the door; he took his boots off and picked her up, shifting her heavy purring weight against his