Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow (best pdf ebook reader txt) 📕

Alan didn’t like or understand Krishna, but that was okay. He understood the others just fine, more or less. Natalie had taken to helping him out after her classes, mudding and taping the drywall, then sanding it down, priming, and painting it. Her brother Link came home from work sweaty and grimy with road dust, but he always grabbed a beer for Natalie and Alan after his shower, and they’d sit on the porch and kibbitz.

Mimi was less hospitable. She sulked in her room while Alan worked on the soundwall, coming downstairs only to fetch her breakfast and coldly ignoring him then, despite his cheerful greetings. Alan had to force himself not to stare after her as she walked into the kitchen, carrying yesterday’s dishes down from her room; then out again, with a sandwich on a fresh plate. Her curly hair bounced as she stomped back and forth, her soft, round buttocks flexing under her long-johns.

On the night that Alan and Natalie put the first coat of paint on the wall, Mimi came down in a little baby-doll dress, thigh-high striped tights, and chunky shoes, her face painted with swaths of glitter.

“You look wonderful, baby,” Natalie told her as she emerged onto the porch. “Going out?”

“Going to the club,” she said. “DJ None Of Your Fucking Business is spinning and Krishna’s going to get me in for free.”

“Dance music,” Link said disgustedly. Then, to Alan, “You know this stuff? It’s not playing music, it’s playing records. Snore.”

“Sounds interesting,” Alan said. “Do you have any of it I could listen to? A CD or some MP3s?”

“Oh, that’s not how you listen to this stuff,” Natalie said. “You have to go to a club and dance.”

“Really?” Alan said. “Do I have to take ecstasy, or is that optional?”

“It’s mandatory,” Mimi said, the first words she’d spoken to him all week. “Great fistfuls of E, and then you have to consume two pounds of candy necklaces at an after-hours orgy.”

“Not really,” Natalie said, sotto voce. “But you do have to dance. You should go with, uh, Mimi, to the club. DJ None Of Your Fucking Business is amazing.”

“I don’t think Mimi wants company,” Alan said.

“What makes you say that?” Mimi said, making a dare of it with hipshot body language. “Get changed and we’ll go together. You’ll have to pay to get in, though.”

Link and Natalie exchanged a raised eyebrow, but Alan was already headed for his place, fumbling for his keys. He bounded up the stairs, swiped a washcloth over his face, threw on a pair of old cargo pants and a faded Steel Pole Bathtub T-shirt he’d bought from a head-shop one day because he liked the words’ incongruity, though he’d never heard the band, added a faded jean jacket and a pair of high-tech sneakers, grabbed his phone, and bounded back down the stairs. He was convinced that Mimi would be long gone by the time he got back out front, but she was still there, the stripes in her stockings glowing in the slanting light.

“Retro chic,” she said, and laughed nastily. Natalie gave him a thumbs up and a smile that Alan uncharitably took for a simper, and felt guilty about it immediately afterward. He returned the thumbs up and then took off after Mimi, who’d already started down Augusta, headed for Queen Street.

“What’s the cover charge?” he said, once he’d caught up.

“Twenty bucks,” she said. “It’s an all-ages show, so they won’t be selling a lot of booze, so there’s a high cover.”

“How’s the play coming?”

“Fuck off about the play, okay?” she said, and spat on the sidewalk.

“All right, then,” he said. “I’m going to start writing my story tomorrow,” he said.

“Your story, huh?”

“Yup.”

“What’s that for?”

“What do you mean?” he asked playfully.

“Why are you writing a story?”

“Well, I have to! I’ve completely redone the house, built that soundwall—it’d be a shame not to write the story now.”

“You’re writing a story about your house?”

“No, in my house. I haven’t decided what the story’s about yet. That’ll be job one tomorrow.”

“You did all that work to have a place to write? Man, I thought I was into procrastination.”

He chuckled self-deprecatingly. “I guess you could look at it that way. I just wanted to have a nice, creative environment to work in. The story’s important to me, is all.”

“What are you going to do with it once you’re done? There aren’t a whole lot of places that publish short stories these days, you know.”

“Oh, I know it! I’d write a novel if I had the patience. But this isn’t for publication—yet. It’s going into a drawer to be published after I die.”

“What?”

“Like Emily Dickinson. Wrote thousands of poems, stuck ’em in a drawer, dropped dead. Someone else published ’em and she made it into the canon. I’m going to do the same.”

“That’s nuts—are you dying?”

“Nope. But I don’t want to put this off until I am. Could get hit by a bus, you know.”

“You’re a goddamned psycho. Krishna was right.”

“What does Krishna have against me?”

“I think we both know what that’s about,” she said.

“No, really, what did I ever do to him?”

Now they were on Queen Street, walking east in the early evening crowd, surrounded by summertime hipsters and wafting, appetizing smells from the bistros and Jamaican roti shops. She stopped abruptly and grabbed his shoulders and gave him a hard shake.

“You’re full of shit, Ad-man. I know it and you know it.”

“I really don’t know what you’re talking about, honestly!”

“Fine, let’s do this.” She clamped her hand on his forearm and dragged him down a side street and turned down an alley. She stepped into a doorway and started unbuttoning her Alice-blue babydoll dress. Alan looked away, embarrassed, glad of the dark hiding his blush.

Once the dress was unbuttoned to her waist, she reached around behind her and unhooked her white underwire bra, which sagged forward under the weight of her heavy breasts. She turned around, treating him to a glimpse of the full curve of her breast under her arm, and shrugged the dress down around her waist.

She had two stubby, leathery wings growing out of the middle of her back, just above the shoulder blades. They sat flush against her back, and as Alan watched, they unfolded and flexed, flapped a few times, and settled back into their position, nested among the soft roll of flesh that descended from her neck.

Involuntarily, he peered forward, examining the wings, which were covered in fine downy brown hairs, and their bases, roped with muscle and surrounded by a mess of ugly scars.

“You… sewed… these on?” Alan said, aghast.

She turned around, her eyes bright with tears. Her breasts swung free of her unhooked bra. “No, you fucking idiot. I sawed them off. Four times a year. They just grow back. If I don’t cut them, they grow down to my ankles.”