They Had Goat Heads Read Online Free PDF Page A

a dog chasing its tail, he pursued the cape, running in circles, trying to grasp its Fabric of Evil . . . He grew dizzy. He stumbled onto a bridge and fell over the railing.
   “The Cape!” said a man from below, pointing . . .

 
    TURNS
     
    They took turns using the scalpel. By dawn, they had successfully severed my feet from my ankles, my hands from my wrists. I stopped screaming. I started screaming again as they began to sew my hands to my ankles, my feet to my wrists with a crewel needle. As always, they took turns. When the operation was over, I cleared my throat, did a handstand, and gestured at the clock with my toes. They frowned at each other, then yawned and turned off the lights.

 
    THE WOMB
     
    A child’s mother wouldn’t allow him to crawl back into her womb. He cried an ocean of tears.
   “The world hurts,” the child had said.
   “I’m on my period,” the mother had replied.
   And so he began to cry. He cried for years, bobbing like a cork in the surf of his misery.
   Finally the mother rowed out to him in a boat. “My period’s over,” she explained. “But the answer is still no.”
   Somewhere a daydream possessed a hummingbird. Flying at top speed, it exploded onto a windowpane . . .

 
    HENCE THE DRAMA
     
    I was shopping for Hawaiian shirts in the clearance section when a clerk appeared with a red phone on a platter. A bird’s nest of bobby pins held her hair in place. I looked back and forth between the hair and the phone.
   The phone rang.
   “It is for you,” said the clerk in an eastern European accent.
   The ring was loud. Shoppers glanced in our direction. I wasn’t entirely sure the clerk was talking to me, even though she had addressed me squarely, even though she was looking right at me, holding the phone out to me, and I was looking at her, and looking at the phone, but still, I couldn’t be sure . . .
   She smiled. Long crow’s feet sprung to attention, redefining the arch of her cheeks. “It is for you,” she repeated.
   There was no cord.
   I hung up the shirt I had been inspecting and picked up the phone.
   “Hello?” said a voice. “Hello? Is this you?”
   “Who is this?” I said.
   “There’s no time for that,” the voice replied. “I’m just glad it’s you.”
   “Who are you?”
   “In five seconds you’re going to hang up the phone. Then something bad will happen.” Five seconds passed. “Ok, hang up the phone now.”
   I listened . . .
   The line went dead. I hung up the phone. The clerk thanked me and walked away, trying too hard to swing her hips.
   She came back as I was slipping into a shirt covered with bruised, wilted flowers. This time she wheeled out an old television set on a metal cart. She had let her hair down; it spilled over her shoulders in kinked tendrils. “This will happen now,” she said, turning a knob on the TV. I glanced over my shoulders to see if anybody was watching me. They weren’t.
   Nothing but silent peppersalt on the TV. I buttoned the shirt and waved my arms in circles to test its flexibility. Too tight. I unbuttoned it.
   The clerk eyeballed me. She had lost all of her color. I thought she might pass out.
   The peppersalt dissolved into a commercial and the sound came on. I couldn’t be sure what the commercial was attempting to sell. In it, a thin man in a white hospital uniform demonstrated how to yank a tooth out of a stranger’s mouth using household tongs. He spoke gibberish but somehow I knew what he meant. He stood on a busy street corner. Strangers passed by and at calculated intervals he tackled one and put him or her in a sleeper hold. After they passed out, he pried open their mouths and, as promised, yanked out a tooth, usually an incisor, but sometimes the front teeth, and once, amazingly, a molar. Blood surged from the resultant wounds and the strangers woke up screaming and ran away