Sinners Circle Read Online Free PDF Page B

upwards you can induce
fatal asphyxiation without any visible injuries.
    “Is that so?”
    She rubs a hand across my chest,
cups one of my breasts and licks the side of my face. “Come. My
place tonight. You can stay, but I need you gone by morning.”
    “Don’t worry.” I touch her chest,
feel her heart beating. “You won’t even hear me leave.”

VI
    My
mother told me that when I was born, we laid in bed for those first three days.
She said I spent the entire time with my eyes closed, my hands not leaving her
hair. She took her baths sitting on the edge of the mattress, her feet in a
washtub as Marcy ran a sponge down her back. We lay there on that dusty sunken
pad of broken springs, my mother spooning the meals brought to her while I fed
from her breasts, staring wide eyed into nothing. On the morning of the fourth
day we rose because somewhere between the break of night and all its darkness
and the blue beginnings of dawn, her warm breast slipped from my mouth and I
cried for the first time. Ancient blankets bundled around me, I sneezed from all the dust buried in the wool. My mother said she picked me
up, carried me to the window and pointed to the still fields surrounding that
dead house. She told me she was looking at the stars as they faded out of the
sky, saying my name to herself over and over as each one went back into the
black of space and all its emptiness. She said she didn’t care, because I was
the only light needed, the rising sun come to chase away the darkness. She said
she told me this, but when she took me off her shoulder and cradled me in her
arms, I was asleep. And soon, so was she.
    I was crawling when the wrecking
ball came. It shattered the living room with one swoop. Marcy was on the
toilet, my mom chucking corn in the kitchen while I explored the shadows of
empty cupboards. Depending on how drunk she was, the story always changed when
she told it to me years later. Sometimes the ball was far from me, sometimes
close, but how we left the place was always the same. We always ran out the
back door, my mother and I squeezed together, chest to chest, Marcy behind,
stiff strips of wheat whipping us raw as we tore through the fields. None of us
had dry eyes when the construction workers chased us down. None of us had any
shoes on when the sheriff put us in his car.
    When the former owners of the
house came into the police station and saw mom and Marcy, heard me screaming in
the social work room, they decided not to press charges. They gave mom two
hundred dollars and the phone number of their church’s minister. Mom took the
money but she threw the seven digits in the trash after they left.

VII
    “How’s
your boss, how’s he doing these days?”
    “Harry? He’s fine.” I drop a dish
in the soapy water, pull the plug and let it drain a little before turning the
tap to hot and filling the sink back up.
    Marcy pushes her wheelchair
towards the miniature Christmas village, each tiny glass house lined up neatly
beside the other on top of an old coffee table. “How’s about
the other fellas in your department? You got
any boys you’d like to bring back to introduce me to?”
    I turn off the tap. “In customer service? Naw Marcy,
you wouldn’t be interested in meeting any of the people I work with.”
    She pinches the cotton sticking
out the chimney of a miniature church. “Oh come on now. I wouldn’t mind. I
haven’t seen you bring home a fellow in years. Just those friends
of yours.” She turns her wheelchair around. “Those girls ...”
    I drop a pot in the water, steam
rising, burning into my eyes. “Isn’t As
The World Turns on?”
    She looks at the cuckoo clock
above her TV. “About ten minutes still.” She sits there, breath in her chest,
frowning and drumming her fingers on the gray rubber of the chair’s wheels. I
say, “You wouldn’t want to meet any of the guys I work with.”
    “Huh?” She looks at the linoleum.
“Why? They a horny bunch or something?”
    I sigh,