This is the Way the World Ends Read Online Free PDF

started for the door – ‘there’s something special about you that you may not be aware of.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘You’re an absolutely astounding scuzz-bucket.’
    Harry then informed Justine that she was fired.
    And so when George came home that evening proudly displaying the scopas suit, Justine’s reaction approximated that of the mother in Jack and the Beanstalk learning that Jack had bartered away the family cow for some magic seeds.
    ‘Six thousand five hundred and ninety-five dollars?’ she gasped. ‘For what? ’
    ‘For civil defense against thermonuclear attack. For Holly’s future. We pay three hundred and forty-five dollars and seventy-one cents a month – that’s including the tax – and after two years it’s ours. It’s from Japan.’
    Justine listened morosely as George jabbered about individual radiation dosimeters, primus stoves, Lexan screens, and Winco Synthefill. He placed the suit on the sofa and took off his work shirt, showering the floor with granite flakes and aluminum-oxide bits, the detritus of his trade; their cottage was highly tactile: granite, aluminum-oxide, sand, pet hair, pieces of mail too important to throw away yet too trivial to file, clothes that quit their hangers on their own initiative, all subsumed in the endless onrush of Holly’s toys. The Irish setter loped over and sniffed the suit. Lucius the cat jumped on it, curled into himself, and took a nap.
    Justine’s horror of the scopas suit was nonverbal and intuitive, the horror of a mother hen seeing a hawk shadow glide across the barnyard. She could find no flaw in the garment’s design, no error in its execution, no fallacy in its purpose. And yet she knew that Holly must never own one.
    ‘I think Santa Claus should bring it,’ said George, eagerly caressing his purchase, which rested on the sofa like a boy king lying in state. ‘She’ll be more likely to wear it if she believes it came from him.’
    ‘George, I lost my job.’
    ‘You what?’
    ‘Harry Sweetser fired me. I blew up a tarantula.’
    ‘Nuts.’
    ‘I’m glad. Not about the tarantula – but I really couldn’t have faced another day at that place.’ She inserted a stick of spearmint gum between her lips like a cigarette, puffed on it. ‘Noah Webster College has a drama department, I hear.’
    ‘I thought we were talking about having another kid. This your way of changing your mind?’
    ‘I’ll take evening courses. By day I’ll be a mother, by night you’ll be a father. Life works out.’
    ‘Our plumbing is rotten, our car has cancer, we can’t afford life insurance, we’re trying to have a baby, and you want to join the circus!’
    ‘Not the circus, the drama department!’ The gum entered her mouth like a log entering a sawmill.
    ‘You have no sense of reality!’
    ‘You have no sense of anything else!’ Justine’s anger had thrown her hair across her face, and now she pushed it aside; curtains parted on large brown eyes, high cheeks, abundant lips, a sensual over-bite – to wit, a face that one might easily imagine on the talent side of a cable television camera, a face that was, by all but the most banal criteria, beautiful. ‘With training I can bring in twice what I was making at Cats and Dogs.’
    ‘Let’s be honest, Justine. Money isn’t something you and I will ever understand. If it grew on trees, we’d be raising chickens.’
    ‘You’re worried about money?’ She chomped violently on her spearmint stick. ‘Then stop going around spending seven thousand dollars like it belonged to somebody else.’
    A fight followed. There was some screaming. Fists were pounded. Resentments emerged like bits of an ancient civilization tossed up by an earthquake. The fight encompassed George’s tendency to assume that the pets were solely Justine’s responsibility, and it included Justine’s tendency to treat her parents shabbily, always forgetting their birthdays. It touched on whether they could really cope with another