Stories (2011) Read Online Free PDF Page A

me." Preacher shook the snake viciously, trying
to jar some life into h, but the snake did not move.
    The pain in Harry's groin had subsided and he could think
again. George was moving in on him, and there just didn't seem any reason to
run. George would catch him, and when he did, it would just be worse because he
would be even more tired from all that running. It had to be done. The mating
dance was over, now all that was left was the intercourse of violence.
    A black fist turned the flesh and cartilage of Harry's nose
into smouldering putty. Harry ducked his head and caught another blow to the
chin. The stars he had not been able to see above him because of the lights, he
could now see below him, spinning constellations on the floor of the pit.
    It came to him again, the fact that he was going to die
right here without one good, last thought. But then maybe there was one. He
envisioned his wife, dumpy and sullen and denying him sex. George became her
and she became George and Harry did what he had wanted to do for so long, he
hit her in the mouth. Not once, but twice and a third time. He battered her
nose and he pounded her ribs.
    And By God, but she could hit back. He felt something crack
in the center of his chest and his left cheekbone collapsed into his face. But
Harry did not stop battering her. He looped and punched and pounded her dumpy
face until h was George's black face and George's black face turned back to her
face and he thought of her now on the bed, naked, on her back, battered, and he
was naked and mounted her, and the blows of his fists were the sexual thrusts
of his cock and he was pounding her until-George screamed. He had fallen to his
knees. His right eye was hanging out on the tendons. One of Harry's straight
rights had struck George's cheekbone with such power it had shattered it and
pressured the eye out of its socket.
    Blood ran down Harry's knuckles. Some of it was George's.
Much of it was his own. His knuckle bones showed through the rent flesh of his
hands, but they did not hurt. They were past hurting.
    George wobbled to his feet. The two men stood facing one
another, neither moving. The crowd was silent. The only sound in the pit was
the harsh breathing of the two fighters, and Preacher who had stretched
Sapphire out on the ground on her back and was trying to blow air into her
mouth. Occasionally he'd lift his head and say in tearful supplication,
"Breathe for me, Sapphire, breathe for me."
    Each time Preacher blew a blast into the snake, its white
underbelly would swell and then settle down, like a leaky balloon that just
wouldn't hold air.
    George and Harry came together. Softly. They had their arms
on each other's shoulders and they leaned against one another, breathed each
other's breath.
    Above, the silence of the crowd was broken when a heckler
yelled "Start some music, the fuckers want to dance."
    "It's nothing personal," George said.
    "Not at all," Harry said.
    They managed to separate, reluctantly, like two lovers who
had just copulated to the greatest orgasm of their lives.
    George bent slightly and put up his hands. The eye dangling
on his cheek looked like some kind of tentacled creature trying to crawl up and
into George's socket. Harry knew that he would have to work on that eye.
    Preacher screamed. Harry afforded him a sideways glance.
Sapphire was awake. And now she was dangling from Preacher's face. She had
bitten through his top lip and was hung there by her fangs. Preacher was saying
something about the power to tread on serpents and stumbling about the pit.
Finally his back struck the pit wall and he slid down to his butt and just sat
there, legs sticking out in front of him, Sapphire dangling off his lip like
some sort of malignant growth.
    Gradually, building momentum, the snake began to thrash.
    Harry and George met again in the center of the pit. A
second wind had washed in on them and they were ready. Harry hurt wonderfully.
He was no longer afraid.
    Both men were