Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow (graded readers TXT) 📕

"Yeah," Ed said, in George's voice, and it cracked before he could close his lips again.

"Right," Adam said. "Well."

They patted their mouth and ran stubby fingers through their lank hair, already thinning though they were still in their teens. They stood and cracked their knuckles against the table. They patted their pockets absently, then pocketed the hundred and the ten.

"Well," Adam said.

They left, turning to give him the keys he'd had cut for them, a gesture that left him feeling obscurely embarrassed and mean-spirited even though -- he told himself -- he'd put them up and put up with them very patiently indeed.

And then he left, and locked the door with his spare keys. Useless spare keys. No one would ever come to stay with him again.

What I found in the cave,

(he said, lying in the grass on the hillside, breathing hard, the taste of vomit sour in his mouth, his arms and legs sore from the pumping run down the hillside)

What I found in the cave,

(he said, and she held his hand nervously, her fingers not sure of how hard to squeeze, whether to caress)

What I found in the cave,

(he said, and was glad that she hadn't come with him, hadn't been there for what he'd seen and heard)

What I found in the cave was the body of my first girlfriend. Her skeleton, polished to a gleam and laid out carefully on the floor. Her red hair in a long plait, brushed out and brittle, circled over her small skull like a halo.

He'd laid her out before my mother, and placed her fingernails at the exact tips of her fingerbones. The floor was dirty and littered with rags and trash. It was dark and it stank of shit, there were piles of shit here and there.

The places where my brothers had slept had been torn apart. My brother Bradley, his nook was caved in. I moved some of the rocks, but I didn't find him under there.

Benny was gone. Craig was gone. Ed, Frankie, and George were gone. Even Davey was gone. All the parts of the cave that made it home were gone, except for my mother, who was rusted and sat askew on the uneven floor. One of her feet had rusted through, and her generator had run dry, and she was silent and dry, with a humus-paste of leaves and guano and gunk sliming her basket.

I went down to the cave where my father spoke to us, and I found that I -- I --

I found that I couldn't see in the dark anymore. I'd never had a moment's pause in the halls of my father, but now I walked falteringly, the sounds of my footsteps not like the steps of a son of the mountain at all. I heard them echo back and they sounded like an outsider, and I fell twice and hurt my head, here --

(he touched the goose egg he'd raised on his forehead)

and I got dizzy, and then I was in the pool, but it didn't sound right and I couldn't hear it right, and I got my clothes off and then I stood there with them in my arms --

(his hand came back bloody and he wiped it absently on the grass and Mimi took hold of it)

Because. If I put them down. It was dark. And I'd never find them again. So I bundled them all up and carried them over my head and I waded in and the water had never been so cold and had never felt so oily and there was a smell to it, a stagnant smell.

I waded out and I stood and I shivered and I whispered, "Father?" and I listened.

I heard the sound of the water I'd disturbed, lapping around my ears and up on the shore. I smelled the sewage and oil smell, but none of the habitual smells of my father: Clean water, coalface, sulfur, grass, and lime.

I picked my way out of the water again and I walked to the shore, and it was too dark to put on my clothes, so I carried them under one arm and felt my way back to the summer cave and leaned against my mother and waited to drip dry. I'd stepped in something soft that squished and smelled between my mother and my father, and I didn't want to put on my socks until I'd wiped it off, but I couldn't bring myself to wipe it on the cave floor.

Marci's eye sockets looked up at the ceiling. She'd been laid out with so much care, I couldn't believe that Davey had had anything to do with it. I thought that Benny must be around somewhere, looking in, taking care.

I closed my eyes so that I wasn't looking into the terrible, recriminating stare, and I leaned my head up against my mother, and I breathed until the stink got to me and then I pried myself upright and walked out of the cave. I stopped and stood in the mouth of the cave and listened as hard as I could, but my father wasn't speaking. And the smell was getting to me.

She got him dressed and she fed him sips of water and she got him standing and walked him in circles around the little paddock he'd collapsed in.

"I need to get Georgie out of the car," he said. "I'm going to leave him in the cave. It's right."

She bit her lip and nodded slowly. "I can help you with that," she said.

"I don't need help," he said lamely.

"I didn't say you did, but I can help anyway."

They walked down slowly, him leaning on her arm like an old man, steps faltering in the scree on the slope. They came to the road and stood before the trunk as the cars whizzed past them. He opened the trunk and looked down.

The journey hadn't been good to Gregg. He'd come undone from his winding sheet and lay face down, neck stiff, his nose mashed against the floor of the trunk. His skin had started to flake off, leaving a kind of scale or dandruff on the flat industrial upholstery inside the trunk.

Alan gingerly tugged loose the sheet and began, awkwardly, to wrap it around his brother, ignoring the grit of shed skin and hair that clung to his fingers.

Mimi shook him by the shoulder hard, and he realized she'd been shaking him for some time. "You can't do that here," she said. "Would you listen to me? You can't do that here. Someone will see." She held something up. His keys.

"I'll back it up to the trailhead," she said. "Close the trunk and wait for me there."

She got behind the wheel and he sloped off to the trailhead and stood, numbly, holding the lump on his forehead and staring at a rusted Coke can in a muddy puddle.

She backed the car up almost to his shins, put it in park, and came around to the trunk. She popped the lid and looked in and wrinkled her nose.

"Okay," she said. "I'll get him covered and we'll carry him up the hill."

"Mimi --" he began. "Mimi, it's okay. You don't need to go in there for me. I know it's hard for you --"

She squeezed his hand. "I'm over it, Andy. Now that I know what's up there, it's not scary any longer."

He watched her shoulders work, watched her wings work, as she wrapped up his brother. When she was done, he took one end of the bundle and hoisted it, trying to ignore the rain of skin and hair that shook off over the bumper and his trousers.

"Up we go," she said, and moved to take the front. "Tell me when to turn."

They had to set him down twice before they made it all the way up the hill. The first time, they just stood in silence, wiping their cramped hands on their thighs. The second time, she came to him and put her arm around his shoulders and gave him a soft kiss on the cheek that felt like a feather.

"Almost there?" she said.

He nodded and bent to pick up his end.

Mimi plunged through the cave mouth without a moment's hesitation and they set him down just inside the entrance, near a pair of stained cotton Y-fronts.

Alan waited for his heart to stop thudding and the sweat to cool on his brow and then he kicked the underwear away as an afterthought.

"God," he said. She moved to him, put her arm around his shoulder.

"You're being brave," she said.

"God," he said again.

"Let it out, you know, if you want to."

But he didn't, he wanted to sit down. He moved to his mother's side and leaned against her.

Mimi sat on her hunkers before him and took his hand and tried to tilt his chin up with one finger, but he resisted her pull and she rose and began to explore the cave. He heard her stop near Marci's skeleton for a long while, then move some more. She circled him and his mother, then opened her lid and stared into her hamper. He wanted to tell her not to touch his mother, but the words sounded ridiculous in his head and he didn't dare find out how stupid they sounded moving through freespace.

And then the washing machine bucked and made a snapping sound and hummed to life.

The generator's dead, he thought. And she's all rusted through. And still the washing machine moved. He heard the gush of water filling her, a wet and muddy sound.

"What did you do?" he asked. He climbed slowly to his feet, facing away from his mother, not wanting to see her terrible bucking as she wobbled on her broken foot.

"Nothing," Mimi said. "I just looked inside and it started up."

He stared at his mother, enraptured, mesmerized. Mimi stole alongside of him and he noticed that she'd taken off her jacket and the sweatshirt, splaying out her wings around her.

Her hand found his and squeezed. The machine rocked. His mother rocked and gurgled and rushed, and then she found some local point of stability and settled into a soft rocking rhythm.

The rush of water echoed off the cave walls, a white-noise shushing that sounded like skis cutting through powder. It was a beautiful sound, one that transported him to a million mornings spent waiting for the boys' laundry to finish and be hung on the line.

All gone

He jerked his head up so fast that something in his neck cracked, needling pain up into his temples and forehead. He looked at Mimi, but she gave no sign of having heard the voice, the words, All gone.

All gone

Mimi looked at him and cocked her head. "What?" she said.

He touched her lips with a finger, forgetting to be mindful of the swelling there, and she flinched away. There was a rustle of wings and clothing.

My sons, all my sons, gone.

The voice emerged from that white-noise roar of water humming and sloshing back and forth in her basket. Mimi squeezed his hand so hard he felt the bones grate.

"Mom?" he said softly, his voice cracking. He took half a step toward the washer.

So tired. I'm worn out. I've been worn out.

He touched the enamel on the lid of the washer, and felt the vibrations through his fingertips. "I can -- I can take you home," he said. "I'll take care of you, in the city."

Too late

There was a snapping sound and