GLASS SOUP by Jonathan Carroll (funny books to read .txt) 📕

it recently. Maybe seeing Mrs. Dugdale on the street now for the first time in thirty years was a test. If he passed it, things would take a turn for the better. Who knows? Life could be sneaky sometimes. The lessons it taught weren’t always straightforward. Anyway, he’d like nothing more than to tell that bitch what he thought of her all these years later.

As he hurried after her now, a thought blazed up in his mind like a flame flaring in total darkness: maybe many of his failures in life had been due to her and that stinking incident so long ago. If she hadn’t scared him into silence, the courage he’d had on the tip of his soul that afternoon would have emerged. For the rest of his life he would have known it was there in him and real and could be used any time he needed it.

Rather than a botched, half-assed, bill-laden, dead-end life full of microwave meals and lousy smells, Haden might have been a contender—if it hadn’t been for Mrs. Dugdale. He picked up his pace.

A few moments after he caught sight of her, a car driving down the street lifted lazily off the pavement and took flight. It buzzed around overhead in a few circles before veering off out of sight behind an office building. Two large chimpanzees dressed like 1930s gangsters in double-breasted suits and black Borsalino hats came out of a nearby store smoking cigars, speaking Italian and walking on their hands. Haden saw these things but paid no attention. Because Dugdale was near.

As he closed in, he touched the tops of her students’ heads as he went. Despite his preoccupation with wanting to reach his old teacher, he couldn’t help noticing how warm the children’s heads were under his hand. Like little coffeepots, all of them, percolating.

“Excuse me, Mrs. Dugdale?”

Her back to him, the woman turned slowly. When she saw the adult Simon Haden standing two feet away, her eyes did not ask Who are you? They said I know who you are—so what?

“Yes, Simon, what do you want?”

Aaaugh! The exact same words she had said to him thirty years ago in the elementary school parking lot. The same unsympathetic expression on her face. Nothing had changed. Not one thing. He was almost middle-aged but she was still looking at him as if he were a bad piece of fruit at the market.

Fuck that. His moment had come. Now was the time to act decisively. Now was the time to say something brilliant and important to show her who was boss.

Because he was in such a state of shock after hearing her familiar words, Haden did not realize that all of Mrs. Dugdale’s students were frozen in place, staring at him with intense anticipation. Nor did he notice that essentially the whole world around him had come to a standstill because it too was waiting to see what he would do next. Oh sure, cars moved along the street and flies buzzed their mad circles in the air. But all of them—the flies, the drivers in the cars, the molecules in their lungs—everything and everyone had turned to Simon Haden to witness what he would do next.

He made to speak. We must give the man that. Stirring words came to him, perfectly right for the moment. The right words, the ideal tone of voice. He was all ready to go. He started to speak but then discovered he no longer had a mouth.

He worked his mouth up and down, or rather the skin on his face where a mouth had previously been. It stretched, it moved, but that was only because it was skin and he was working the muscles beneath it. Muscles that should have controlled a mouth but Haden did not have one of those anymore. He had only skin there—smooth flat skin like the long expanse on a cheek.

He put both hands up to touch it but that only confirmed what he already feared—no mouth. Unwilling to believe what they were feeling, his fingers kept groping around as if they were feeling for a light switch in the dark.

He glanced at Mrs. Dugdale. Her expression made that terrible moment worse. Scorn. The only thing on her face was scorn. Scorn for Haden, scorn for his cowardice, and scorn for whomever he was now in her eyes. He was reliving his thirty-year-old moment of truth with her in the school parking lot. And this time he would have prevailed—if he’d only had a mouth.

But he didn’t. Frantically he slapped the space on his face where a mouth should have been. While doing that, he glared at the woman—this villain in an Afro who was winning again. The only weapon he had to use now was his eyes. But eyes are not meant for this kind of warfare. A dirty look doesn’t have the firepower, the mega-tonnage a ripping good sentence does.

Somewhere in a far corner of his mind, Haden knew that he had been here before, right smack in the middle of this moment and same situation, mouthless. But his fury and exasperation combined brushed aside this déjà vu. So what if he had been here before—he still had to handle it now. Still had to find a way to defeat Dugdale and show her that he was not the fool her mocking eyes said he was.

Desperation growing, he looked around for something, anything that he could use. His eyes fell on a little girl. Her name was Nelly Weston and she was one of Mrs. Dugdale’s students. The girl was tormented too often by the teacher for being too slow, too sloppy, too dreamy for Dugdale’s liking.

Haden picked up Nelly and slid his hand under the back of her sweatshirt. It happened so fast that she didn’t have a chance to protest. But when he touched her bare back she understood instantly what he was doing and smiled like she had never smiled before in her teacher’s