Thinner by Stephen King

Author:Stephen King
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3, pdf
Publisher: Penguin USA, Inc.
Published: 2011-01-03T05:00:00+00:00

He parked his car in a baking macadam lot, paid the attendant seventeen dollars for a half-day stub, transferred his wallet from his hip pocket to the inside pocket of his sport coat, and started hunting.

At first he thought that the weight loss had perhaps speeded up. Everyone was looking at him. The rational part of his mind quickly assured him that it was just because of his clothes, not the way he looked inside his clothes.

People would stare at you the same way if you showed up on this boardwalk wearing a swimsuit and a T-shirt in October, Billy. Take it easy. You’re just something to look at, and down here there’s plenty to look at.

And that was certainly true. Billy saw a fat woman in a black bikini, her deeply tanned skin gleaming with oil. Her gut was prodigal, the flex of the long muscles in her thighs nearly mythic, and strangely exciting. She moved toward the wide sweep of white beach like an ocean liner, her buttocks flexing in wavelike undulations. He saw a grotesquely fat poodle dog, its curls summer-sheared, its tongue—more gray than pink—hanging out listlessly, sitting in the shade of a pizza shack. He saw two fistfights. He saw a huge gull with mottled gray wings and dead black eyes swoop down and snatch a greasy doughboy from the hand of an infant in a stroller.

Beyond all this was the bone-white crescent of Old Orchard beach, its whiteness now almost completely obscured by reclining sunbathers at just past noon on an early-summer day. But both the beach and the Atlantic beyond it seemed somehow reduced and cheapened by the erotic pulses and pauses of the midway—its snarls of people with food drying on their hands and lips and cheeks, the cry of the hucksters (“Guess your weight!” Billy heard from somewhere to his left; “If I miss by more than five pounds, you win the dollaya choice!”), the thin screeches from the rides, the raucous rock music spilling out of the bars.

Billy suddenly began to feel decidedly unreal—outside of himself, as if he were having one of those Fate magazine instances of astral projection. Names—Heidi, Penschley, Linda, Houston—seemed suddenly to ring false and tinny, like names made up on the spur of the moment for a bad story. He had a feeling that he could look behind things and see the lights, the cameras, the key grips, and some unimaginable “real world.” The smell of the sea seemed overwhelmed by a smell of rotten food and salt. Sounds became distant, as if floating down a very long hallway.

Astral projection, my ass, a dim voice pronounced. You’re getting ready to have sunstroke, my friend.

That’s ridiculous. I never had a sunstroke in my life.

Well, I guess when you lose a hundred and twenty pounds, it really fucks up your thermostat. Now are you going to get out of the sun or are you going to wind up in an emergency room somewhere giving your Blue Cross

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