Lit Read Online Free PDF

a startled cheetah before such a man—a beast of an unknown phylum.
    On my last day, dropping an armload of ratty cutoffs and salt-crusted bikinis into the apartment complex’s garbage cans, I spied a thrown-out notebook and nicked it for my disheveled pages—for some reason, all unlined typing paper. I used a pen to poke holes into every margin, which seemed to take a long time, hole by hole. It was dusk when the sheets slid bumpily together and the notebook’s silver claws snapped shut. There was sweat on my upper lip.
    I stepped out the sliding door into the dusty odor of eucalyptus, a light wind. Over the valley of orange tile roofs, you could catch just a gray strip of sea from there. I set out walking the hills for the last time. With my ponytailed hair and the sweater tied around my neck like a sitcom coed, I looked into any undraped picture window at the families around lamplit tables, pretending they’d celebrate my homecoming at term break.

2
The Mother of Invention
    If Jesus had said to her before she was born, “There’s only two places available to you. You can either be a nigger or you can be white-trash,” what would she have said? “Please. Jesus, please,” she would’ve said, “just let me wait until there’s another place available.”
    —Flannery O’Connor, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”
    M other’s yellow station wagon slid like a Monopoly icon along the gray road that cut between fields of Iowa corn, which was chlorophyll green and punctuated in the distance by gargantuan silver silos and gleaming, unrusted tractors glazed cinnamon red. Mother told me how the wealth of these farmers differed from the plight of the West Texas dirt farmers of her Dust Bowl youth, who doled out mortgaged seed from croker sacks.
    But because I was seventeen and had bitten my cuticles raw facing the prospect of fitting in at the private college we’d reach that night—which had accepted me through some mixture of pity and oversight—and because I was split-headed with the hangover Mother and I had incurred the night before, sucking down screwdrivers in the unaptly named Holiday Inn in Kansas City, I told Mother something like, Enough already about your shitty youth. You’ve told me about eight million times since we pulled out of the garage.
    She asked me if we had any more of the peaches we’d bought in Arkansas.
    We got peaches galore, I said.
    The car was fragrant with the bushels of fruit we’d been wolfing for two days while our bowels grumbled. I picked through the soft bottom peaches for an unbruised one to hand her. I asked, Wasn’t that the name of some famous stripper, Peaches Galore?
    Pussy Galore, I believe, Mother said. She bit the peach with a zeal that made me cringe, as did her cavalier use of the word pussy , though I myself used it with alacrity.
    To look at her behind the wheel, with the mess she could make of a peach, appalled me. She was so primordial. She had to wipe the juice off her chin with the back of her hand.
    Out the window, legions of neat corn about to tassel announced a severe order I longed to enter into, one that would shut out the sprawling chaos of Mother.
    She tapped her cup of watery ice, saying, I could use a little dollop of vodka in there. The cup was in its sandbagged holder on the bump in the car floor next to her streamlined legs in exercise sandals. And if, as Samuel Johnson said, everyone has the face they deserve at fifty, Mother must have paid some demon off, for despite her wretched habits, her face looked amazing at her half century—with her shock of salt-and-pepper hair, pale skin, and fine features.
    She said, Don’t look at me that way. We got up at five. It’s cocktail hour by our schedule. We got any more ice?
    I fixed her drink, then lowered myself on the spider’s silk of my attention back into One Hundred Years of Solitude and the adventures of the Buendía family. The prodigal José Arcadio, once stolen by the gypsies, returned wearing