Slices Read Online Free PDF

outside the rainstreaked windows.
    “Questions
I’m not going to answer.”
    I
looked up at him. His hand reached out to catch the drops as they
fell.
    “You
lived another life before this one,” he said. “Nine
months of warmth and comfort and security and silence and nothing
anyone said to you then, if you could even have understood the words,
could possibly have prepared you for this life. You wouldn’t
have known what it meant to go from floating to crawling and walking;
you wouldn’t have understood what it was to breathe. You have a
hundred questions, I know. But you were born once without any
knowledge at all of the world you were being thrust into. And you can
do it again. You’ll have to.”
    “I
— I understand.”
    He
smiled a crooked and cruel smile. “No. You don’t
understand. But that’s all right.” The blood was pooling
in his hand. “Now — knowing that you don’t know,
that you can’t know what’s ahead of you — do you
consent to it all the same? Do you still want this?”
    “Yes.”
    He
looked at me for a long moment, the light from passing neon signs
running hazy and soft over his perfect features. “Then it will
be done,” he told me.
    And
those were the last words he spoke to me that evening. The car took
me home; he hadn’t asked where I lived, and I hadn’t told
him, but I was home just the same. His driver opened the door for me,
a look on his face like pity or sympathy or hunger, and I got out and
walked away without a look back. He’d find me. I knew he would.
    And
without looking back, I could see in my mind as clearly as if I was
watching it myself, what I knew had to have happened next; his
blood-filled palm raising to those perfect lips, tasting me at last.
It had to have happened.
    I
fell asleep that night with my window open, windswept rain falling
into the room like a blessing. Face down on my bed, still dressed, my
mouth pressed gently against my own wrist.

    I
still had the razor blade, and the next day, I used it to slit open
the envelope.
    It
had taken me a while to remember where I’d put it. I’d
given up on the idea, many months ago, and had hidden the envelope
away. I found it on a bookshelf, tucked behind a patchwork collection
of children’s books and Kathe Koja novels, sheltered and dark.
    I
slid the razor under the flap of the huge, bulky envelope, opened it
like a vein, and spilled the contents onto the table. A half a dozen
smaller envelopes stared stillborn up at me, their pale faces bearing
addresses, but no return address. I never intended to get an answer
to these letters.
    Understand
— I didn’t mean a word of these as I wrote them. Back
when I was still suicidal, I never cared enough to write a suicide
note. So when I wrote these, I knew I was lying with each word.
    A
few whispered goodbyes in the right ears, I thought to myself,
feeling the paper crinkling under my fingers, and the world would let
me disappear.
    I
wrote these just after you’d killed yourself. When the world
wouldn’t have been surprised if I’d just simply followed
you. When I didn’t want to die, not even then, but when I was
seriously considering letting everyone think I had.
    I
left the envelopes sitting on my table, and went into the bathroom
with a huge pair of scissors and a bowl full of hair bleach. I hacked
off my long tangles and turned what was left a faded photograph
blonde.
    One
last look around the old place, walking around and looking at ghosts
while the bleach ate away at the color of my hair. Still-frame images
in my mind, superimposed over the evening sunlit room. You standing
in my doorway, a hundred goodbyes after a hundred practices, leaving
when I wished right down to my bones that you’d stay. You in my
kitchen, trying to teach me how to cook, laughing as I burned the
last egg out of a dozen. You dancing around my apartment, arms and
legs flying in a free and furious tangle — we’d gone out
that night, bought fifty TVs and fifty DVD players