When the Killing's Done Read Online Free PDF

the water, creeping numbly up from her feet and into her ankles and legs and torso, overwhelming her, claiming her degree by degree. Water, water every where . Just as she was about to surrender, to open herself up, open wide and let the harsh insistent unforgiving current flow through her and tug her down to where the waves couldn’t touch her ever again, the ocean gave her something back: it was a chest, an ice chest, floating low in the water under the weight of its burden. A silver thing, silver as the belly of her fish. Sears, Roebuck. Guaranteed for life. She claimed it as her own, and though she couldn’t get atop it, it was there and it sustained her as the wind bit and the sun rose up out of the gloom to parch her lips and scorch the taut white mask of her upturned face.

Rattus Rattus

    S he had never been so thirsty in all her life. Had never known what it was, what it truly meant, when she read in the magazines of the Bedouin tumbling from their camels and their camels dying beneath them or the G.I.’s stalking the rumor of Rommel’s Panzers across the dunes of North Africa and water only a mirage, because she’d lived in a house with a tap in a place where the grass was wet with dew in the morning and you could get a Coca-Cola at any lunch counter or in the machine at the service station around the corner. If she was thirsty, she drank. That was all.
    Now she knew. Now she knew what it was like to go without, to feel the talons clawing at your throat, the tongue furred and bloating in the tomb of your mouth, barely able to swallow, to breathe. There was ice in the chest—and beer, chilled beer, the bottles clinking and chirping with the rhythm of the waves—but she didn’t dare crack the lid, even for an instant. It was the air inside that kept her afloat and if she lifted the lid the air would rush out and where would she be then? The bottles clinked. Her throat swelled. The sun beat at her face. But this was a special brand of torture, reserved just for her, worse than anything devised by the most sadistic Jap commandant, and she kept wondering what she’d done to deserve it—the ice right there, the beer, the sweet cold sparkling pale golden liquid in the bottle that would shine with condensation just inches away, and she dying of thirst.
    She swallowed involuntarily at the thought of it, the lining of her throat as raw as when she’d had tonsillitis as a girl and twisted in agony with the blinds closed and the starched rigid sheets biting into her till her mother came like an angel of mercy with ginger ale in a tall cold glass, with sherbet, Jell-O, ice cubes made of Welch’s grape juice to suck and roll over her tongue and clench between her teeth till all the moisture was gone. Her mother’s hand reached out to her, she saw it, saw it right there framed against the waves, and her mother’s face and the dripping glass poised in her hand. It was too much to bear. She gave in and wet her lips with seawater, though she knew she shouldn’t, knew it was wrong and would only make things worse, and yet she couldn’t help herself, her tongue probing and lapping as if it weren’t attached to her at all. The relief was instantaneous, flooding her like a drug—water, there was water inside her. But then, almost immediately, her throat swelled shut and her cracked lips began to bleed.
    To bleed . That was the secondary problem: blood. Both her elbows were scraped and raw and there was a deep irregular gash on the back of her left hand, the one the scalding coffee hadn’t touched. How it had got there, she couldn’t say, and she was so numb from the cold she couldn’t feel the sting of it, though clearly it would need stitches to close the wound and there’d be a scar, and for some time now she’d been idly examining the torn flesh there, thinking she’d have to see a doctor when they got back and already making up a little speech for him, how she’d want a really top-notch man because she just