Squid Pulp Blues Read Online Free PDF

installed himself) and drove away listening to Frank Gorshin sing “Never Let Her Go”.

     
    Chapter Seven
    Marie crawled on the floor, refusing to accept what had just happened.
    She could barely remember walking up to the bathroom door. Time had seemed to slow; her body a glacier inching its way toward the noises. She remembered snorting the coke but now she was sure it wasn’t plain coke. As she used her arms to drag herself across the filthy rug, Marie looked to the window and saw a man looking in.
    Her recent memory of what happened in the bathroom seeped like oil into the present moment, soaking the motel room in a sepia-toned aura. The man at the window now resembled the thing in the bathroom. What was it? She could barely remember. Everything was going slowly. Her thoughts wouldn’t come quickly.
    What’s happening to me?
    Marie made another move across the rug and saw the man leave the window. She wanted to remember his face, wanted to memorize it in case she needed it later though Marie couldn’t really come up with a reason why. Her mind just couldn’t process anything.
    Shutting her eyes, she tried to focus. It was a white guy with black hair. No wait, brown hair, looked black though. But it could’ve been red, dark red if there wasn’t enough light. Whatever, he’s a white guy, tall. No. I’m on the ground so of course he looked tall. Fuck.
    Marie remembered the man’s eyes being bright, shining into the room like two tiny flashlights. That couldn’t have been right. Were they headlights? Was a car pulling in behind him? Was someone after her? She could feel her heart beating faster and faster as she pushed her mind through to the next thought.
    What was he wearing? Couldn’t see the pants but he was wearing a white undershirt. People call them wife-beaters, real charming name. There were stains on it, yeah, stains all across the front in patterns of some kind, like that stupid Kabbalah shit that Terry had tattooed on his back.
    The thoughts were coming quicker now but with them came the remembrance of what transpired in the bathroom. She turned her head and saw that she had no feet.
    “Oh god,” Marie said. It surprised her mostly because she felt no pain, no phantom limb tingling or itching. All the time she was dragging herself across the floor, it hadn’t occurred to her as to the reason why she was not walking. Now it was clear.
    She looked at the window, wanting the man to come back and help her. Why did he look in the room if not to see if something was wrong? Now she went through the shards of memory of what had happened in the bathroom.
    There had been a naked woman there; she remembered that. Naked and covered in dirt. She was sniffing Marie’s shoe, holding it to her face like an oxygen mask. On the floor was some sort of machine, something that looked to Marie like a combination of a manual meat grinder and a cappuccino maker. Then what? She couldn’t remember.
    The woman looked at me and then she put my shoe down, yeah. She put it down and held out her hand. Her fingers were filthy, gross and then…
    Something to do with the machine, Marie thought. Her feet were gone with no trace of blood, pain, or scars. It was as if she never had any feet at all. Marie’s mind refused to delve into the past any further. There had been a filthy woman in her bathroom who was nude and smelling her shoes. Then something happened to her feet and she was left to crawl out of the bathroom and across the room.
    So now what?
    She listened for the man at the window. He had gone but maybe he’d come back with some help. At this point she wasn’t worried about the police, wasn’t worried about being caught with the drugs in her purse. The rug below her was stained like the man’s shirt: 11 circles and a myriad of criss -crossing lines. The stains kept Marie’s attention focused for a few seconds and then she dropped her head on the design below her. She sniffed each circle.
    Mustard. Pickles. Beer.