The Parallel Apartments Read Online Free PDF

act quickly enough, that was what I did… didn’t do. I know you hate me, and you should, you should. Darn it, we could have made it, too. We could’ve stole off in the night, together, I mean really together, as one, and gone to Phoenix. Or Richmond. Richmond was a good, pretty town then, 1971, or that’s what people said. Could’ve gone there. As one.”
    Justine did not like being accosted by anyone, especially the occasional chatty homeless person who appeared to have modest gifts of historical clairvoyance and who could focus like a ruby laser on their particular vision. Justine reached into her apron—had she been wearing this the whole time?—for a dollar and slid it across the pink Formica under a root. The witch disappeared the note like a conjure.
    â€œThankyougodblesshaveanincredibleday.”
    The witch selected a hole, opened her mouth grotesquely, and tossed it in. Her lips snapped closed over it like the shutter on a large-format camera.
    â€œBut after all that, I really worried when you disappeared. I didn’t expect it. I saw it on the news, your picture, in color. Yearbook picture, I know—I dropped into the school library later on to verify. Justine, so youthful, you look exactly the same now—”
    â€œHow do you know my name?” said Justine, exhausted, done from a dehydrating cry, not ready for whatever was now happening. The witch talked and talked.
    â€œâ€”a baby. I was so alone, before you. Who could I talk to? Not Quentinforce.”
    â€œWho are you?”
    A vagal nausea, different from morning sickness, that she hadn’t experienced since Austin began to rise like a moon in her gut.
    â€œThe only comfort Quentinforce ever offered me was when on our first anniversary he bought me my own bed. When you came to be with us I was never lonely. Even after they stole you—even if I didn’t see you more than once every couple of years afterward—I would never be lonely again. I let you be, you know, when you were growing up. I knew that was best for both of us. I didn’t seek you out; as long as you were near, in the city limits, I was all right.”
    Justine turned to make sure Meenakshi was still here. Yes; she had finished her doughnut, her twenty-dollar lipstick undusted.
    â€œWhat’s happening?” said Justine, unsure if she was addressing the witch or herself.
    â€œSometimes we would meet, by accident… you don’t remember, I’m sure. I saw you a few times at Fiesta Mart, the one off Thirty-Eighth? At least three times. Isn’t that funny? Once in the makeup aisle, you tried on blue mascara, bought that and a bottle of Dr Pepper and a Skor bar, you dropped your receipt outside and the wind blew it almost to I-35 but I caught it, I still have it. You paid with your ATM card 5545 1000 0678 3401 expiration 10/90 and once I saw you walking down South First with a boy, a little sweet thing, he loved you and I wonder how he is, is it him you married? and another time I saw you in a drugstore, working, you were working so hard behind the register, selling film and Brach’s and Cogentin and Haldol, those’re what I bought, do you remember? and once and I’ll never forget this I saw you at St. David’s emergency room, me I was thereafter Mrs. Cracy from Progress House dropped me off for not taking my pills and for getting loopy and falling off a bus-stop kiosk and cutting myself and you were there with a nice policewoman, Officer Prado, do you remember her? Big, big, big and strong, enough to carry you all by herself, you didn’t have on any shoes and there must’ve been a hundred beach towels wrapped around your arm but there was so much blood soaked all the way through I thought you were holding a dead baby, I’ve never seen so much blood, before you got through the swinging doors you looked at me once, during an ad for Squirt gum—remember that stuff?—it was on