Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, Cory Doctorow [best historical fiction books of all time txt] 📗

shrugged and the wings under her jacket strained against the fabric. She reached for the door. He jammed his fingers into the chain-link near the top and hauled himself, scrambling, over the fence, landing on all fours in a splintering of tomato plants and sticks.

He got to his feet and bridged the distance between them.

“I don’t believe you, Mimi,” he said. “I don’t believe you. Come over to my place and let me get you a cup of coffee and an ice pack and we’ll talk about it, please?”

“Fuck off,” she said tugging at the door. He wedged his toe in it, took her wrist gently.

“Please,” she said. “We’ll wake him.”

“Come over,” he said. “We won’t wake him.”

She cracked her arm like a whip, shaking his hand off her wrist. She 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