Hemlock Grove Read Online Free PDF

regret!—tasting all the while the delectable discord between the sweet of the apricot and bitter of the spinach, the effusive pepper and rakish scallion, chaste almond and concupiscent tomato: a feast if not for the belly then the spirit. And more important, I feel as though Mother took note. I am more than some living—albeit unwieldy—marionette who will dance obediently at the manipulation of her strings; as you have been so kind to suggest, I am an intelligent, autonomous individual with valid desires. I believe this encounter may have earned your nervy niece some small measure of, does she dare say it? respect.
    Otherwise, I’m finding the transition to high school genial enough. My studies are coming apace; I continue to progress at a rate in defiance of standardization: while the more advanced of my classmates are occupied with Spanish subjunctives or trigonometric functions, I am at my corner—my sanctuary—in the back boning up on my classical Greek or Bohm’s quantum mind hypothesis (food for thought—I am indebted for the recommendation). I am also, it shall please you to hear, racking up friends at a positively dizzying pace! Christina Wendall has taken to giving me sympathetic looks when no one is watching—working her way, I’m confident, to a proper introduction (as though words had more to offer than the plain grace of the soul’s window); your own Letha remains, as I’m sure is no news to you, a positive angel; and that Gypsy boy I referred to once before continues to favor me with his charms. What a devil he is!—a few inches shorter than the other boys his age, but broader in the shoulder (of course, either way he is doll-sized relative to your affectionate authoress). He is of swarthy complexion with a black ponytail possessing the sheen that suggests petroleum jelly as his hair product of choice. Roman says he is a werewolf. Mother says he is vermin and to have no truck with him (directed, naturally, at Roman—it would not occur to her to include me in such an admonition).
    I do hope he was not involved in the incident at Kilderry Park. (How I wept when I heard.) Of course, if I am to live with the decisions I make, I suppose I ought to take care with questions to which I may prefer not to know the answer.
    Yours always,
    S.G.

 
    The Angel
    The virgin placed the applicator on the counter and rinsed her hands and sat on the edge of the tub, waiting. Not for the answer; the answer she knew. The test was for them, for the proof she knew they would need. Or at least a certain extent of proof, to be sure a conversation starter.
    Check with your physician if you get unexpected results , it said on the box. This was one way of putting it.
    The virgin looked at the pending window of the applicator. She was not unafraid, but more so she remembered the way it had shone, the halo over his head, shining not just gold but all the colors in a shimmering aurora. She stood up and inhaled deeply, puffing out her belly, and held her breath and rubbed her hands over that uncanny foundry, the ember of his perfect light inside it.
    *   *   *
    Olivia Godfrey met Dr. Norman Godfrey at the Penrose Hotel bar the next afternoon. Olivia was an unpleasantly beautiful woman of indeterminate age. She wore a white Hermès pantsuit in brazen Old World indifference that Labor Day had been weeks ago, with a head scarf around a head of black hair and blacker Jackie O sunglasses. She sipped a gin martini. Dr. Godfrey was a trim man in his middle age with prematurely graying hair and beard, and eyes that under normal circumstances had a certain cast of patrician magnanimity, this the favored result of the parallel character traits of a deep fundamental kindness and near complete lack of humility. But these were not normal circumstances and his stride was hard with purpose, his green Godfrey eyes bullets in extreme slow motion. She slid a scotch neat down the bar at his arrival and he ignored it.
    “Did you have