1999 - Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk

Author:Chuck Palahniuk
Format: epub
Published: 1999-10-30T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

Jump to the moment around one o’clock in the morning in Evie’s big silent house when Manus stops screaming and I can finally think.

Evie is in Cancun, probably waiting for the police to call her and say: Your house-sitter, the monster without a jaw, well, she’s shot your secret boyfriend to death when he broke in with a butcher knife is our best guess.

You know that Evie’s wide awake right now. In some Mexican hotel room, Evie’s trying to figure out if there’s a three-hour or a four-hour time difference between her big house where I’m stabbed to death, dead, and Cancun, where Evie’s supposed to be on a catalogue shoot. It’s not like Evie is entered in the biggest brain category. Nobody shoots a catalogue in Cancun in the peak season, especially not with big-boned cowgirls like Evie Cottrell.

But me being dead, that opens up a whole world of possibility.

I’m an invisible nobody sitting on a white damask sofa facing another white sofa across a coffee table that looks like a big block of malachite from Geology 101.

Evie slept with my fiancé, so now I can do anything to her.

In the movie, where somebody is invisible all the sudden—you know, a nuclear radiation fluke or a mad scientist recipe—and you think, what would I do if I was invisible…? Like go into the guy’s locker room at Gold’s gym or, better yet, the Oakland Raiders’ locker room. Stuff like that. Scope things out. Go to Tiffany’s and shoplift diamond tiaras and stuff.

Just by his being so dumb, Manus could’ve stabbed me, tonight, thinking I was Evie, thinking Evie shot me, while I was asleep in the dark in her bed.

My dad, he’d go to my funeral and talk to everybody about how I was always about to go back to college and finish my personal fitness training degree and then no doubt go on to medical school. Dad, Dad, Dad, Dad, Daddy, I couldn’t get past the fetal pig in Biology 101. Now I’m the cadaver.

Sorry, Mom. Sorry, God.

Evie would be right next to my Mom, next to the open casket. Evie would stagger up leaning on Manus. You know, Evie would’ve found something totally grotesque for the undertaker to dress me in. So Evie throws an arm around my mom, and Manus can’t get away from the open casket fast enough, and I’m laying there in this blue velveteen casket like the interior of a Lincoln Town Car. Of course, thank you, Evie, I’m wearing this concubine evening wear Chinese yellow silk kimono slit up the side to my waist with black fishnet stockings and red Chinese dragons embroidered across the pelvic region and my breasts.

And red high heels. And no jawbone.

Of course, Evie says to my mom: “She always loved this dress. This kimono was her favorite.” Sensitive Evie would say, “Guess this makes you oh for two.”

I could kill Evie.

I would pay snakes to bite her.

Evie would be wearing this little black cocktail number with an asymmetrical hemline satin skirt and a strapless bodice by Rei Kawakubo.

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