Waste Read Online Free PDF

and tried to climb out of bed. He’d spent the whole night hosing down the front of his car, chipping off the bits of lion flesh that had frozen to the front bumper. He dropped them down the sewer grate at the base of the driveway, trying to slip them down into the sludge of leaves and dead squirrels that caused the street to flood every spring. Scott almost caught him when he backed out of the driveway at 4 a.m.
    Renee had coffee going in the kitchen when he went upstairs. The stench of Scott’s sanitation gear was everywhere. Ever since she and Scott got married in the summer, Renee had gone all formal, as if she didn’t have a school of mermaids tattooed up her spine.
    â€œYou see the paper yet?” Renee said.
    Someone had found the lion. Somehow he’d left a glove or piece of the car—there were serial numbers on cars, weren’t there? Shit, they put serial numbers on everything now.
    â€œScottie said you should look at this story they got on like page ten, it’s buried in there somewhere. Someone you know.”
    It wasn’t like Scott had circled the article for him. Every time he turned a page, Jamie felt the grind of his bones against one another. His neck strained to stay in place, every muscle tensed and bleating for some relief. Jamie scanned past the used car advertisements and into the police bulletins. Someone had robbed the beer store again. Someone else had smashed ten windows at the new courthouse they’d built over the old J.P. Chemical land.
    â€œKansas called for you last night, too, like one in the morning again. Her mom know she’s doing that?” Renee said. “Five years old, calling the house? She gonna stay with us again any time soon?”
    â€œUh, this weekend?”
    It was at the bottom of the page. Body found in Athabasca Park identified by police. The body was a few weeks old, according to the article. Jamie remembered the name.
    â€œKansas still obsessed with dinosaurs? I was thinking we could get a T. Rex pie dish or something, saw it at the Bulk Barn. Or maybe…”
    Access to local dental records confirmed the man’s identity. A long-time local resident, Connor Justin Condon, now considered a homicide by local officials.
    â€œSure, yeah. I mean, she hasn’t grown out of it yet. Go ahead and get the cake…Renee?”
    Renee was slumped down on a chair by the sink, her face buried in her chest, a mermaid peering over the back of her collar. She barely made a noise when she slept.
    â€œYou there, Renee?”
    Jamie pulled himself up from the table and shoved the page of newsprint into his back pocket. He ran a chapped hand through her faded red hair and turned off the tap she’d left running at the sink. The overhead fan in the kitchen turned slowly, raining dust down on everything in the purple light. Jamie could taste it on his tongue.

5
    Brock Cutcherson lived in one of the Polish neighborhoods down by the lake where everybody double parked and stole from their neighbors’ tiny herb gardens when they weren’t home. He rented a basement apartment from the Karskises and often had to deal with stamping feet when he turned his Iron Maiden records up too loud. But it was fuckin’ Maiden, so whatever.
    Still, the Karskises often invited him up to dinner with their quiet daughter Karina, who wore the desperately needed braces Brock’s rent checks had paid for over the last two and a half years. She worked for Macalister and McGowan, an old downtown law firm based out of a former funeral home. They kept her in the basement sorting old files, where she often composed poems on the back of subpoenas before running them through the shredder, never to be read again. She knew her father would not approve. Sometimes she left Brock notes in the shared laundry room, tucked inside the lint catcher.
    â€œSo it’s like this, right: ‘Mr. Cutcherson, although you have never spoken to me alone before, I