Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow (best pdf ebook reader txt) 📕
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- Author: Cory Doctorow
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For his part, he was heartsick that he turned out not to be half so clever as he’d fancied himself. There wasn’t much money around the mountain that season—the flakes he’d brought down to the assayer had been converted into cash for new shoes for the younger kids and chocolate bars that he’d brought to fill Bradley’s little round belly.
He missed the school library achingly during that week, and it was that lack that drove him to the town library. He’d walked past the squat brown brick building hundreds of times, but had never crossed its threshold. He had a sense that he wasn’t welcome there, that it was not intended for his consumption. He slunk in like a stray dog, hid himself in the back shelves, and read books at random while he observed the other patrons coming and going.
It took three days of this for him to arrive at his strategy for getting his own library card, and the plan worked flawlessly. Bradley pulled the books off the back shelves for the final time, the librarian turned in exasperation for the final time, and he was off and out with the card in his hand before the librarian had turned back again.
Credentialed.
He’d read the word in a book of war stories.
He liked the sound of it.
“What did Krishna do?”
“What do you mean?” She was looking at him guardedly now, but his madness seemed to have past.
“I mean,” he said, reaching over and taking her hand, “what did Krishna do when you went out for coffee with him?”
“Oh,” she said. She was quiet while they drove a narrow road over a steep hill. “He made me laugh.”
“He doesn’t seem that funny,” Alan said.
“We went out to this coffee shop in Little Italy, and he sat me down at a tiny green metal table, even though it was still cold as hell, and he brought out tiny cups of espresso and a little wax-paper bag of biscotti. Then he watched the people and made little remarks about them. ‘She’s a little old to be breeding,’ or ‘Oh, is that how they’re wearing their eyebrow in the old country?’ or ‘Looks like he beats his wife with his slipper for not fixing his Kraft Dinner right.’ And when he said it, I knew it wasn’t just a mean little remark, I knew it was true. Somehow, he could look at these people and know what they were self-conscious about, what their fears were, what their little secrets were. And he made me laugh, even though it didn’t take long before I guessed that that meant that he might know my secret.”
“So we drank our coffee,” she said, and then stopped when the body thudded in the trunk again when they caught some air at the top of a hill. “We drank it and he reached across the table and tickled my open palm with his fingertips and he said, ‘Why did you come out with me?’
“And I mumbled and blushed and said something like, ‘You look like a nice guy, it’s just coffee, shit, don’t make a big deal out of it,’ and he looked like I’d just canceled Christmas and said, ‘Oh, well, too bad. I was hoping it was a big deal, that it was because you thought I’d be a good guy to really hang out with a lot, if you know what I mean.’ He tickled my palm again. I was a blushing virgin, literally though I’d had a couple boys maybe possibly flirt with me in school, I’d never returned the signals, never could.
“I told him I didn’t think I could be romantically involved with him, and he flattened out his palm so that my hand was pinned to the table under it and he said, ‘If it’s your deformity, don’t let that bother you. I thought I could fix that for you.’ I almost pretended I didn’t know what he meant, but I couldn’t really, I knew he knew I knew. I said, ‘How?’ as in, How did you know and How can you fix it? but it just came out in a little squeak, and he grinned like Christmas was back on and said, ‘Does it really matter?’
“I told him it didn’t, and then we went back to his place in Kensington Market and he kissed me in the living room, then he took me upstairs to the bathroom and took off my shirt and he—”
“He cut you,” Alan said.
“He fixed me,” she said.
Alan reached out and petted her wings through her jacket. “Were you broken?”
“Of course I was,” she snapped, pulling back. “I couldn’t talk to people. I couldn’t do anything. I wasn’t a person,” she said.
“Right,” Alan said. “I’m following you.”
She looked glumly at the road unraveling before them, grey and hissing with rain. “Is it much farther?” she said.
“An hour or so, if I remember right,” he said.
“I know how stupid that sounds,” she said. “I couldn’t figure out if he was some kind of pervert who liked to cut or if he was some kind of pervert who liked girls like me or if I was lucky or in trouble. But he cut them, and he gave me a towel to bite on the first time, but I never needed it after that. He’d do it quick, and he kept the knife sharp, and I was able to be a person again—to wear cute clothes and go where I wanted. It was like my life had started over again.”
The hills loomed over the horizon now, low and rolling up toward the mountains. One of them was his. He sucked in a breath and the car wavered on the slick road. He pumped the brakes and coasted them to a stop on the shoulder.
“Is that it?” she said.
“That’s it,” he said. He pointed. His father was green and craggy and smaller than he remembered. The body rolled in the trunk. “I feel—” he said. “We’re taking him home, at least. And my father will know what to do.”
“No boy has ever taken me home to meet his folks,” she said.
Alan remembered the little fist in the dirt. “You can wait in the car if you want,” he said.
Krishna came home,
(she said, as they sat in the parked car at a wide spot in the highway, looking at the mountains on the horizon)
Krishna came home,
(she said, after he’d pulled off the road abruptly, put the car into park, and stared emptily at the mountains ahead of them)
Krishna came home,
(she said, lighting a cigarette and rolling down the window and letting the shush of the passing cars come fill the car, and she didn’t look at him, because the expression on his face was too terrible to behold)
and he came through the door with two bags of groceries and a bottle of wine under one arm and two bags from a ravewear shop on Queen Street that I’d walked past a hundred times but never gone into.
He’d left me in his apartment that morning, with his television and his books and his guitar, told me to make myself at home, told me to call in sick to work, told me to take a day for myself. I felt… glorious. Gloried in. He’d been so attentive.
He’d touched me. No one had touched me in so long. No one had ever touched me that way. He’d touched me with… reverence. He’s gotten this expression on his face like, like he was in church or something. He’d kept breathing something too low for me to hear and when he put his lips right to my ear, I heard what he’d been saying all along, “Oh God, oh God, my God, oh God,” and I’d felt a warmness like slow honey start in my toes and rise through me like sap to the roots of my hair, so that I felt like I was saturated with something hot and sweet and delicious.
He came home that night with the makings of a huge dinner with boiled soft-shell crabs, and a bottle of completely decent Chilean red, and three dresses for me that I could never, ever wear. I tried to keep the disappointment off my face as he pulled them out of the bag, because I knew they’d never go on over my wings, and they were so beautiful.
“This one will look really good on you,” he said, holding up a Heidi dress with a scoop neck that was cut low across the back, and I felt a hot tear in the corner of my eye. I’d never wear that dress in front of anyone but him. I couldn’t, my wings would stick out a mile.
I knew what it meant to be different: It meant living in the second floor with the old Russian Auntie, away from the crowds and their eyes. I knew then what I was getting in for—the rest of my life spent hidden away from the world, with only this man to see and speak to.
I’d been out in the world for only a few years, and I had barely touched it, moving in silence and stealth, watching and not being seen, but oh, I had loved it, I realized. I’d thought I’d hated it, but I’d loved it. Loved the people and their dialogue and their clothes and their mysterious errands and the shops full of goods and every shopper hunting for something for someone, every one of them part of a story that I would never be part of, but I could be next to the stories and that was enough.
I was going to live in an attic again.
I started to cry.
He came to me. he put his arms around me. He nuzzled my throat and licked up the tears as they slid past my chin. “Shhh,” he said. “Shhh.”
He took off my jacket and my sweater, peeled down my jeans and my panties, and ran his fingertips over me, stroking me until I quietened.
He touched me reverently still, his breath hot on my skin. No one had ever touched me like that. He said, “I can fix you.”
I said, “No one can fix me.”
He said, “I can, but you’ll have to be brave.”
I nodded slowly. I could do brave. He led me by the hand into the bathroom and he took a towel down off of the hook on the back of the door and folded it into a long strip. He handed it to me. “Bite down on this,” he said, and helped me stand in the tub and face into the corner, to count the grid of tiles and the greenish mildew in the grout.
“Hold still and bite down,” he said, and I heard the door close behind me. Reverent fingertips on my wing, unfolding it, holding it away from my body.
“Be brave,” he said. And then he cut off my wing.
It hurt so much, I pitched forward involuntarily and cracked my head against the tile. It hurt so much I bit through two thicknesses of towel. It hurt so much my legs went to mush and I began to sit down quickly, like I was fainting.
He caught me, under my armpits, and held me up, and I felt something icy pressed to where my wing had been—I closed my eyes, but I heard the leathery thump as my wing hit the tile floor, a wet sound—and gauzy fabric was wrapped around my chest, holding the icy towel in place over the wound, once twice thrice, between my tits.
“Hold still,” he said. And he cut off the other one.
I screamed this time, because he brushed the wound he’d left the first time, but I managed to stay upright and to not crack my head on anything. I felt myself crying but couldn’t hear it, I couldn’t
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