Man Made Monsters by Andrea Rogers

Author:Andrea Rogers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Levine Querido

Ghost Cat

Stephanie King

Dulisdi 17, 2016

09/17/2016

The week after my cousin and best friend Diane died and I decided calculus and life were too hard, my mother showed up to my dorm with her hair dyed red and a cardboard box in her arms. Covered with silhouettes of kittens, bunnies, and puppies, it was the kind of box the pet store gave you when you were willing to adopt an animal, but too cheap to spring for a real carrier. My roommate invited my mother into our suite, then left.

Mom found me underneath a too-thin comforter in my tiny dorm room. Except for trips to the bathroom, I had been in bed since my best friend’s death. Mistakenly under the impression my mom was capable of providing some kind of comfort, my suitemate had gotten in touch with her.

Mom sat down in my desk chair with the slightly battered box in her lap. My mother is something else. She makes me crazy. She sat very still, but occasionally I could hear a noise. It was like the sound of someone methodically making tiny tears in the cardboard, patiently and minutely shredding it from the inside with an art knife.

“No cats in the dorm,” I said, through the gap in my blanket of solitude.

Mom opened the box briefly and pointed its top at me.

“Do you see a cat?” she said.

I didn’t respond. I didn’t even try to guess what she was up to. It was best to keep your expectations low with people like my mother. I hadn’t seen her in a year. Mom had once often repeated a story her grandmother had told her about a Blackfoot man coming to the door of their home on Ucluelet Island, claiming they were relatives. Her great-grandmother had no interest in Indians and ran him off, but Mom had gotten a lot of mileage claiming to be Indian. A year earlier, I’d asked her to stop, and we hadn’t spoken since.

I heard the box land on my desk.

“You know, I cosigned some pretty big loans for you to go to this school. Do you know what I could do with an extra eighteen thousand dollars?”

I was well aware of what she could do with extra money. My father, David King, had moved back to Oklahoma to deal with his father, Jimmy, and had never been able to come back. Mom raised me in a house full of art and medicine cards. There was little food, even when there was extra money, since my mother had a weird definition of what constituted a necessity.

I rose to the bait: “I thought you always said money was less real than time. That it’s just an illusion?”

She laughed. “Yes, but Sallie Mae is real. And she will really garnish my checks, if we aren’t able to pay back your loans because you flunked out of school. It’s a little late to decide calculus is too hard.”

We were both quite for a moment.

“What’s the formula for the reciprocation of unconditional love? The algorithm of secret keeping,” I muttered.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.