Invisible Monsters Remix by Chuck Palahniuk

Author:Chuck Palahniuk
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction, Azizex666, General
ISBN: 9780393084030
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2012-06-04T04:00:00+00:00

ump to one time, nowhere special, just Brandy and me shopping along a main street of stores in some Idaho town with a Sears outlet, a diner, a day-old bakery store, and a realtor’s office with our own Mr. White Westinghouse gone inside to hustle some realtor. We go into a secondhand dress shop. This is next door to the day-old bargain bakery, and Brandy says how her father used to pull this stunt with pigs just before he took them to market. She says how he used to feed them expired desserts he bought by the truckload from this kind of bakery outlet. Sunlight comes down on us through clean air. Bears and mountains are within walking distance.

Brandy looks at me over a rack of secondhand dresses. “You know about that kind of scam? The one with the pigs, sweetness?” she says.

He used to stovepipe potatoes, her father. You hold the burlap bag open and stand a length of stovepipe inside. All around the pipe, you put big potatoes from this year’s crop. Inside the pipe you put last year’s soft, bruised, cut, and rotting potatoes so folks can’t see them from through the burlap. You pull the stovepipe out, and you stitch the bag shut tight so nothing inside can shift. You sell them roadside with your kids helping, and even at a cheap price, you’re making money.

We had a Ford that day in Idaho. It was brown inside and out.

Brandy pushes the hangers apart, checking out every dress on the rack, and says, “You ever hear of anything in your whole life so underhanded?”

Jump to Brandy and me in a secondhand store on that same main street, behind a curtain, crowded together in a fitting room the size of a phone booth. Most of the crowding is a ball gown Brandy needs me to help get her into, a real Grace Kelly of a dress with Charles James written all over it. Baffles and plenums and all that high-stressed skeletoning engineered inside a skin of shot-pink organza or ice-blue velveteen.

These most incredible dresses, Brandy tells me, the constructed ball gowns, the engineered evening dresses with their hoops and strapless bodices, their stand-up horseshoe collars and flaring shoulders, nipped waists, their stand-away peplums and bones, they never last very long. The tension, the push and pull of satin and crepe de Chine trying to control the wire and boning inside, the battle of fabric against metal, this tension will shred them. As the outsides age, the fabric, the part you can see, as it gets weak, the insides start to poke and tear their way out.

Princess Princess, she says, “It will take at least three Darvons to get me into this dress.”

She opens her hand, and I shake out the prescription.

Her father, Brandy says, he used to grind his beef with crushed ice to force it full of water before he sold it. He’d grind beef with what’s called bull meal to force it full of cereal.

“He wasn’t a bad person,” she says.

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