Waste by Andrew F. Sullivan

Author:Andrew F. Sullivan
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: WASTE
ISBN: 9781938103407
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Published: 2016-07-30T16:00:00+00:00

19

Someone was protesting outside the courthouse downtown. A lone man with a megaphone and a pharmacist’s coat paced the sidewalk. Jamie Garrison drove past the man and his sign, the broken capitals lettered in red ink. He didn’t bother to read it. The man screamed something.

Jamie sped up.

After work, Jamie had found all of his underwear folded into tiny parcels on the frozen lawn. Scott refused to say much, still wearing his garbage-man gear, hauling boxes outside onto the dead grass. Renee watched from the window, holding her pregnant stomach. Scott refused to listen to Jamie’s explanations about sleeping on the couch, about turning over a new leaf. He told Jamie all that shit was rotted out now. It was already gone. Some neighbors had walked away with his sweaters and a few VHS tapes.

“No need for you to go back inside.”

The bone can was still waiting for Jamie. It was patient. Compared to that slowly molting face, the lion was just a blip. It only lingered along his shins and in the spaces between his vertebrae like isolated sparks. If he stood very still, Jamie could barely feel it.

The Condom kid was still all over the radio, his ragged teenage face plucked from yearbooks in someone’s basement, so-called friends and former acquaintances emerging like bed bugs from the woodwork to feed off the excitement. Jamie listened to them sob over a body they all claimed to know, while another marinated behind the store in pig’s blood and leftover fat.

The strip mall parking lot was empty. The old pickups had moved on to less conspicuous spots. Jamie walked across the pavement with a limp and banged on the glass door. He should never have swallowed all those pills the night before. He banged on the door again. Renee had slept in his bed again, had been doing that on and off for months when she was sleepwalking. Mornings where he woke up to a school of mermaids beside him. It had been a few months since she had thrown herself down the basement stairs. She had bled all over the steps, but the baby was fine.

“Larry, you home?”

The door opened to a cloud of smoke and the Lorax’s pink eyes peered out.

“Oh, it’s you again. What do you want? And it’s the Lorax. If you read the book, you’ll see it’s kind of inspirational,” he said. “In like a sad, defeated way.”

“I need to talk to you a bit.”

The Lorax bit his lip and pulled the door wide open. He was only wearing a baseball jersey.

“I still got the entire Pirates’ starting lineup, if you’re interested. Never even been touched by air, vacuum sealed as soon as they came off the printing press. I also got the Maz himself, limited edition, very fancy shit. You know the Maz? Only guy to ever pull off the walk-off homer to win the Series, and he did it for Pittsburgh. No one gets walk-offs anymore.”

“Not here for baseball,” Jamie said. “It’s like croquet to me: a stick, a ball, and a bunch of idiots chasing each other around the field.

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