Halloween Candy Read Online Free PDF

Covering his face in the white towel, Nix’s features came through the cloth. Layton shivered slightly. Something about the towel on the face reminded him of his father’s madness. The form without expression. The open mouth without sound.

    “Nurse Allen found it, this little pin,” Layton grabbed the towel back, rolling it into a ball. “She took it from you. Last night.”

    “Oh, that,” Nix swept a hand in the air. “That night nurse is no good. She’s a brick. She finds that and she thinks I’m just plotting to stab her in the neck twenty times with it or plunge it into her heart and extract it. She’s crazy.”
    47

    Layton wanted to add: it’s what you did to two women on the Outside, Nix. Why wouldn’t she think you’d use it on her, too?

    4

    Layton met Angela again the following Saturday, they got a little drunk again, ended up down on the muddy bank of the river, found a dry rock, kissed, almost began to make love, but she said she just wasn’t in the right mood. “It’s my mother,” she said. “She’s been giving me hell lately.”

    “I keep forgetting you’re nineteen.”

    “I turned twenty.”

    “When?”

    “Thursday.”

    “Happy Birthday.”

    “I don’t care about birthdays or age. Or anything. It’s all this proof. It means nothing. If I told you I was twenty seven, you wouldn’t really know the difference. It’s just revolutions of the earth. Years go by. Gravity pulls. We all buy into it.” Angela reached into her breast pocket 48

    and withdrew a pack of cigarettes. She offered him one – he snapped it up – and then sucked one up between her lips, lit it, puffed, and sighed.
    “All learning is about trapping. Keeps you trapped inside this…vehicle…we call a body. We learn that we’re flesh and bone, but somewhere it’s all particles. Somehow the particles convince us we’re solid. I took molecular biology last semester and barely understood a word, but the way I see it, we’re all just convincing ourselves that anything we are or see is solid, but it’s not. It’s confetti. Bits and pieces and then it’s all like this river. Look at the river – silt and fish and water and amoebas and all kinds of things, and we call it river, but it’s all one thing, and who’s really to say that the fish actually moves or if it becomes water and in the next second is fish again only because it was water?”

    “Well,” he said, nibbling on her ear, “college and beer are doing you good I see.”

    “Well, it’s hard to swallow some of the bullshit.”

    “Yeah, tell me about it. It’s like being raised Catholic.”

    “You? Catholic?”
    49

    He laughed. “Yeah, you know all that belief shit. Even science is full of its little beliefs, and half the problem is buying into them or not. Just like you said.”

    “Well,” she shrugged, “I believe in a lot of what you’d probably call belief shit.”

    “I gave up believing in anything I can’t see when my father died,”
    he said quietly. He wanted to laugh and make a joke of this, but he couldn’t.

    She opened her mouth to speak, but smoke came out. She stubbed the cigarette out on the rock.

    “My mother is basically dying,” Angela began, almost inaudibly. She said it again a bit louder. Layton had nothing to add. He wanted to say something wise and kind, but no words came to mind. “She’s dying, and I’m just getting started on life. She’s a nightmare at times. I’ve wished her dead with each surgery. For her own sake. I’ve wished her gone. Can’t imagine having a daughter like me.” She brightened for a second. “Change the subject, quick. I don’t want to think about it.”
    50

    “I had a boring week,” he said. “You don’t want to hear about it. I’m sorry about –“

    “I really mean it. Change the subject. Poor baby. Boredom is worse than dying. Change the subject. Your work, your boyhood, your religious awakening, anything.”

    “In my job, boredom is