Charity by Mark Richard

Author:Mark Richard [Richard, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-8041-5056-9
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-05-22T04:00:00+00:00

charity

There was no railing on the bridge. Just a timber-high tire guard. The sedan rode the bridge for an instant, then rolled to rest in the mud below. Undiscovered until dawn, the child broken, the woman dead.

The child waited the charity-ward calendar for someone to claim him, his legs in plaster and braced to his neck. Babble and drool and suppers of boiled oats and soft eggs was Cleft Palate Week. Blind Month was like a party game, uncertain hands shaking the child awake as they groped the side rails of his bed trying to find their own. The child waited Splayed Hip Month, Faceless Weekend, the Undescended Testicle Day. Burn Month was in summer. Children tearing a favorite toy apart and thrashing it to the floor, nuns in the midst of the screaming, first with ointment and ice, then syringes. Even injected, the thrashing and the noises, something like flesh on flesh in the beds, bright reds and whites.

The child made friends with a boy with a tail. The boy stole small things from the covers of the coma children for them to play with. The doctors were going to cut off the boy’s tail, the boy said, and when he asked, the nuns told him it would be buried in a cemetery by a priest. When the boy asked if he would be permitted to attend the funeral the nuns had said no, that his soul was not in his tail.

Then I am going to run away, confided the boy to the broken child, the tail twitching the pants leg it was tucked into.

When it came time for the boy with the tail they caught him by surprise. The nuns lifted him from his breakfast tray and fastened him into a gown. The broken child waved as they pushed him past on the table with wheels. Later, the boy came back with his tail. What he was missing in his bed were his legs.

You told them! the boy accused the broken child. I am going to kill you, the boy said, his tail still swimming its nervous search of the empty sheets.

I am getting better, the boy with the tail told the broken child in Recovery Row. You’d better not sleep at night.

At night the child watched the boy with the tail’s bed. At the doorway to the ward a nun snored across an open book, a flashlight and a teacup in the blue gloom. The child watched an arm rise up quickly and throw from the covers across the way, and then he would feel the scramble of a roach on his face. Hundreds the size of fingers lived in the bedside urinals. The broken child would try to catch the roach before it crawled down into his plaster and nested. Catch! A quick rise and whisper, Catch! until a sweep of flashlight made them still.

Brain Month the boy with the tail ate from the trays around him. I am getting strong, whispered the boy with the tail.

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