Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow (phonics books TXT) 📕

/> stared at him out of her swollen eye and he felt the jolt again. Some
recognition. Some shock. Some mirror, his face tiny and distorted in her
eye.

She shivered.

"Help me over the fence," she said pulling her skirt between her knees
-- bruise on her thigh -- and tucking it behind her into her
waistband. She jammed her bare toes into the link and he gripped one
hard, straining calf in one hand and put the other on her padded, soft
bottom, helping her up onto a perch atop the fence. He scrambled over
and then took one bare foot, one warm calf, and guided her down.

"Come inside," he said.

She'd never been in his house. Natalie and Link went in and out to use
his bathroom while they were enjoying the sunset on his porch, or to get
a beer. But Mimi had never crossed his threshold. When she did, it felt
like something he'd been missing there had been finally found.

She looked around with a hint of a smile on her puffed lips. She ran her
fingers over the cast-iron gas range he'd restored, caressing the
bakelite knobs. She peered at the titles of the books in the kitchen
bookcases, over the honey wood of the mismatched chairs and the
smoothed-over scars of the big, simple table.

"Come into the living room," Alan said. "I'll get you an ice pack."

She let him guide her by the elbow, then crossed decisively to the
windows and drew the curtains, bringing on twilight. He moved aside his
piles of clothes and stacked up the suitcases in a corner.

"Going somewhere?"

"To see my family," he said. She smiled and her lip cracked anew,
dripping a single dark droplet of blood onto the gleaming wood of the
floor, where it beaded like water on wax paper.

"Home again, home again, jiggety jig," she said. Her nearly closed eye
was bright and it darted around the room, taking in shelves, fireplace,
chairs, clothes.

"I'll get you that ice pack," he said. As he went back into the kitchen,
he heard her walking around in the living room, and he remembered the
first time he'd met her, of walking around her living room and thinking
about slipping a VCD into his pocket.

He found her halfway up the staircase with one of the shallow
bric-a-brac cabinets open before her. She was holding a
Made-in-Occupied-Japan tin robot, the paint crazed with age into
craquelaire like a Dutch Master painting in a gallery.

"Turn it upside down," he said.

She looked at him, then turned it over, revealing the insides of the
tin, revealing the gaudily printed tuna-fish label from the original can
that it had been fashioned from.

"Huh," she said and peered down into it. He hit the light switch at the
bottom of the stairs so that she could see better. "Beautiful," she
said.

"Have it," he said surprising himself. He'd have to remove it from The
Inventory. He restrained himself from going upstairs and doing it before
he forgot.

For the first time he could remember, she looked flustered. Her
unbruised cheek went crimson.

"I couldn't," she said.

"It's yours," he said. He went up the stairs and closed the cabinet,
then folded her fingers around the robot and led her by the wrist back
down to the sofa. "Ice pack," he said handing it to her, releasing her
wrist.

She sat stiff-spined in on the sofa, the hump of her wings behind her
keeping her from reclining. She caught him staring.

"It's time to trim them," she said.

"Oh, yes?" he said, mind going back to the gridwork of old scars by her
shoulders.

"When they get too big, I can't sit properly or lie on my back. At least
not while I'm wearing a shirt."

"Couldn't you, I don't know, cut the back out of a shirt?"

"Yeah," she said. "Or go topless. Or wear a halter. But not in public."

"No, not in public. Secrets must be kept."

"You've got a lot of secrets, huh?" she said.

"Some," he said.

"Deep, dark ones?"

"All secrets become deep. All secrets become dark. That's in the nature
of secrets."

She pressed the towel-wrapped bag of ice to her face and rolled her head
back and forth on her neck. He heard pops and crackles as her muscles
and vertebrae unlimbered.

"Hang on," he said. He ran up to his room and dug through his T-shirt
drawer until he found one that he didn't mind parting with. He brought
it back downstairs and held it up for her to see. "Steel Pole Bathtub,"
he said. "Retro chic. I can cut the back out for you, at least while
you're here."

She closed her eyes. "I'd like that," she said in a small voice.

So he got his kitchen shears and went to work on the back of the shirt,
cutting a sizable hole in the back of the fabric. He folded duct tape
around the ragged edges to keep them from fraying. She watched
bemusedly.

"Freakshow Martha Stewart," she said.

He smiled and passed her the shirt. "I'll give you some privacy," he
said, and went back into the kitchen and put away the shears and the
tape. He tried not to listen to the soft rustle of clothing in the other
room.

"Alan," she said -- *Alan* and not *Asshole* or *Abel* -- "I could use
some help."

He stepped cautiously into the living room and saw there, in the
curtained twilight, Mimi. She was topless, heavy breasts marked red with
the outline of her bra straps and wires. They hung weightily, swaying,
and stopped him in the doorway. She had her arms lifted over her head,
tugging her round belly up, stretching her navel into a cat-eye
slit. The T-shirt he'd given her was tangled in her arms and in her
wings.

Her magnificent wings.

They were four feet long each, and they stretched, one through the neck
hole and the other through the hole he'd cut in the T-shirt's back. They
were leathery as he remembered, covered in a downy fur that glowed where
it was kissed by the few shafts of light piercing the gap in the
drapes. He reached for the questing, almost prehensile tip of the one
that was caught in the neck hole. It was muscular, like a strong finger,
curling against his palm like a Masonic handshake.

When he touched her wing, she gasped and shivered, indeterminately
between erotic and outraged. They were as he imagined them, these wings,
strong and primal and dark and spicy-smelling like an armpit after sex.

He gently guided the tip down toward the neck hole and marveled at the
intricate way that it folded in on itself, at the play of mysterious
muscle and cartilage, the rustle of bristling hair, and the motility of
the skin.

It accordioned down and he tugged the shirt around it so that it came
free, and then he slid the front of the shirt down over her breasts,
painfully aware of his erection as the fabric rustled down over her
rounded belly.

As her head emerged through the shirt, she shook her hair out and then
unfolded her wings, slowly and exquisitely, like a cat stretching out,
bending forward, spreading them like sails. He ducked beneath one,
feeling its puff of spiced air on his face, and found himself staring at
the hash of scars and the rigid ropes of hyperextended muscle and
joints. Tentatively, he traced the scars with his thumbs, then, when she
made no move to stop him, he dug his thumbs into the muscles, into their
tension.

He kneaded at her flesh, grinding hard at the knots and feeling them
give way, briskly rubbing the spots where they'd been to get the blood
going. Her wings flapped gently around him as he worked, not caring that
his body was pretzeled into a knot of its own to reach her back, since
he didn't want to break the spell to ask her to move over to give him a
better angle.

He could smell her armpit and her wings and her hair and he closed his
eyes and worked by touch, following scar to muscle, muscle to knot,
working his way the length and breadth of her back, following the muscle
up from the ridge of her iliac crest like a treasure trail to the muscle
of her left wing, which was softly twitching with pleasure.

She went perfectly still again when he took the wing in his hands. It
had its own geometry, hard to understand and irresistible. He followed
the mysterious and powerful muscles and bones, the vast expanses of
cartilage, finding knots and squeezing them, kneading her as he'd
kneaded her back, and she groaned and went limp, leaning back against
him so that his face was in her hair and smelling her scalp oil and
stale shampoo and sweat. It was all he could do to keep himself from
burying his face in her hair and gnawing at the muscles at the base of
her skull.

He moved as slow as a seaweed and ran his hands over to her other wing,
giving it the same treatment. He was rock-hard, pressed against her, her
wings all around him. He traced the line of her jaw to her chin, and
they were breathing in unison, and his fingers found the tense place at
the hinge and worked there, too.

Then he brushed against her bruised cheek and she startled, and that
shocked him back to reality. He dropped his hands to his sides and then
stood, realized his erection was straining at his shorts, sat back down
again in one of the club chairs, and crossed his legs.

"Well," he said.

Mimi unfolded her wings over the sofa-back and let them spread out, then
leaned back, eyes closed.

"You should try the ice-pack again," he said weakly. She groped blindly
for it and draped it over her face.

"Thank you," she sighed.

He suppressed the urge to apologize. "You're welcome," he said.

"It started last week," she said. "My wings had gotten longer. Too
long. Krishna came home from the club and he was drunk and he wanted
sex. Wanted me on the bottom. I couldn't. My wings. He wanted to get the
knife right away and cut them off. We do it about four times a year,
using a big serrated hunting knife he bought at a sporting-goods store
on Yonge Street, one of those places that sells dud grenades and camou
pants and tasers."

She opened her eyes and looked at him, then closed them. He shivered and
a goose walked over his grave.

"We do it in the tub. I stand in the tub, naked, and he saws off the
wings right to my shoulders. I don't bleed much. He gives me a towel to
bite on while he cuts. To scream into. And then we put them in garden
trash bags and he puts them out just before the garbage men arrive, so
the neighborhood dogs don't get at them. For the meat."

He noticed that he was gripping the arm rests so tightly that his hands
were cramping. He pried them loose and tucked them under his thighs.

"He dragged me into the bathroom. One second, we were rolling around in
bed, giggling like kids in love, and then he had me so hard by the
wrist, dragging me naked to the bathroom, his knife in his other fist. I
had to keep quiet, so that I