We Disappear by Scott Heim

Author:Scott Heim
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

In my haste after the accident, I’d forgotten to lock the front door. When I stepped inside the house, I noticed the lingering odor, and thought once again of cake (red velvet cake, one of Alice’s specialties, dark chocolate batter and blood-red food coloring).

I entered the sunlit kitchen, the scene of her fall. The floor was littered with garbage and random newspaper faces. The spray of blood formed an alarming arc, almost a complete circle, across the kitchen, as though someone had sliced the tip of their tongue and, openmouthed, spun a perfect pirouette.

A sob was rising damply in my throat, and, to fight it, I began to clean. She kept the paper towels above the sink on an antique red-maple rolling pin. I knelt and covered the blood with the towels. I dabbed the spattered newspaper clippings; the refrigerator magnets, tiny carrot and pepper and onion. Amid the trash was the straw from her earlier milkshake, and beside it, a silver key from a tin of sardines, one of many frivolous gifts I’d bought my mother on an errand. The sardines were her favorite, the kind soaked in mustard (on special, I remembered, at eighty-nine cents a tin), and when she’d briefly forgotten her sickness and ate them, the look on her face—dipping a saltine cracker, then lifting the flaked, coppery flesh to her mouth—had been sheer satisfaction.

But I could clean the mess later. For now, there was the basement; the dark, cobwebbed storage room. Gradually, with a rising dread, I’d begun to understand the reason for her errand.

I kicked the embarrassing pink slippers from my feet, then opened the basement door and descended. I pulled the chain of an overhead lamp to brighten more shadows. I pulled the lamp in the adjoining bathroom. I added some sun by drawing the miniature curtains that looked out, weed-level, to the garden.

A spoor of dried mud led to the little black door. The key was still in the lock. With a push, I opened the door on the room.

The boy was sitting on a foldout cot she had prepared for him. “Hey,” he said, and put his hand to the scarf around his neck. “I know I’m supposed to keep this over my mouth, but she didn’t make it tight enough.”

“Oh, my God,” I said.

He wore the tennis shoes from the day we’d found him on the road. He wore the sweatshirt with the overstretched sleeves. The shirt beneath was different—only a white T-shirt now, its neck frayed—but the name tag remained, the tiny OTIS at the bottom and the empty, nameless space above.

His eyelashes were damp, the lids heavy with recent sleep. His hair seemed curlier, messier. Above the ear was a spot where the barber had slipped. His face still showed the bored, bullying sneer; I wanted to push or punch him, to retaliate for our last contact. But I could only stand and breathe his smell. It was a humid, almost appealing smell, a sweet, adolescent sweat. With horror, I noticed his feet were tied with rope.

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.