Waste Read Online Free PDF Page A

moth balls and Pepto Bismol. The dark purple carpet was covered in cigarette burns. The blinds to the balcony were closed. Most of the balconies in Da Nasty were locked. There were too many lonely men romancing the concrete five stories down. Pigeons and a lone red-tailed hawk now ruled the balconies, slowly coating the rails in white each summer, only to have it washed away by the rain and snow every winter.
    â€œHey, Mom, you here?”
    â€œJust in the bathroom, baby boy. Just in the bathroom.”
    â€œYou got any plans for coming out of there tonight?”
    â€œI got the Judge in here with me, too,” Elvira said.
    It wasn’t the same Judge from the old days. This Judge was found at a Salvation Army near the butcher shop; it was bright teal and cracked between the holes. Elvira didn’t mind. Moses had scrawled THE JUDGE on it with a Sharpie before he brought it home.
    The television blared with piped-in laughter as Moses lay down in the bed. Bill Cosby tried to speak to him about the meaning of life through a blast of static, but he ignored the voice. He could smell the dusted meat sticking to his arm hair, but there was no way to get into that bathroom now. Elvira had locked the door. He walked down the hall past the sound of bashing headboards to the ice machine and plunged his lion-stained hands deep into the ice catcher under the machine.
    â€œWhat the fuck are you doing?”
    A man towered over the ice machine and looked down at Moses. The man’s wide gut was mounted over a stiff belt buckle. A long beard covered the top of his stomach. A sword wrapped in a green snake stretched down the knuckles of his left hand. Moses stood his ground, trapped with his hands wrist deep in the cold ice.
    â€œWashing my hands, Grandpa.”
    The older man grunted and turned to walk back down the hallway. He dragged a wet garbage bag behind him still covered in snow.
    Moses pulled his hands out and followed the man down the hall. The carpet was thick and shaggy. It masked his steps. The door to Room 227 slammed closed behind the man’s balding head, and Moses leaned against the yellow wall. He could hear someone praying from somewhere behind the wallpaper, the rise and fall of a Hail Mary repeating as Moses tried to forget every fact he’d learned about lions in his grade-school days. Massive, muscled bodies that could grow up to eight feet in length, heavy spines which lined the male’s penis, the power of their kills based on brutal strangulation of their prey.
    Everything he ever learned watching television at five in the morning with the sound blaring and cigarettes burning the tips of his fingers. This would be the best way to forget lions and rogue members of ZZ Top dragging garbage bags through his motel, his home. The hallway was quieter than normal, the late-night residents still hitting the bars and each other down in lower Larkhill. Moses kept earplugs in a can under the bed for weekend nights, when all the vacant rooms filled with lot lizards and line workers with new paychecks to burn and burn till there was nothing left but ash. The Hail Marys continued and Moses nodded along until they finally stopped.
    Lions. He had to forget lions. He walked down the uneven hallways, barely testing the doors. He didn’t expect to find any abandoned wallets tonight. Tonight was supposed to be about forgetting things. Forgetting his mother holed up in the bathroom, forgetting the smell of his pants, his father in Arizona, the essay he was supposed to hand in tomorrow at 10 a.m. for World History. He was already pretty good at forgetting which nation bombed which first, but right now all he had to try and forget was the steaming pile he and Garrison had left on the side of the road for the whole world to find.
    From inside his room, Moses heard his Mom cackle and cracked what only the most optimistic man would call a smile.
    Jamie Garrison awoke in his brother’s unfinished basement