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

keep quiet, so that I wouldn’t wake Link and Natalie, but he was hurting me, and I was scared. I tried to say something to him, but I could only squeak. He hurled me into the tub and I cracked my head against the tile. I cried out and he crossed the bathroom and put his hand over my mouth and nose and then I couldn’t breathe, and my head was swimming.

“He was naked and hard, and he had the knife in his fist, not like for slicing, but for stabbing, and his eyes were red from the smoke at the club, and the bathroom filled with the booze-breath smell, and I sank down in the tub, shrinking away from him as he grabbed for me.

“He—growled. Saw that I was staring at the knife. Smiled. Horribly. There’s a piece of granite we use for a soap dish, balanced in the corner of the tub. Without thinking, I grabbed it and threw it as hard as I could at him. It broke his nose and he closed his eyes and reached for his face and I wrapped him up in the shower curtain and grabbed his arm and bit at the base of his thumb so hard I heard a bone break and he dropped the knife. I grabbed it and ran back to our room and threw it out the window and started to get dressed.”

She’d fallen into a monotone now, but her wingtips twitched and her knees bounced like her motor was idling on high. She jiggled.

“You don’t have to tell me this,” he said.

She took off the ice pack. “Yes, I do,” she said. Her eyes seemed to have sunk into her skull, vanishing into dark pits. He’d thought her eyes were blue, or green, but they looked black now.

“All right,” he said.

“All right,” she said. “He came through the door and I didn’t scream. I didn’t want to wake up Link and Natalie. Isn’t that stupid? But I couldn’t get my sweatshirt on, and they would have seen my wings. He looked like he was going to kill me. Really. Hands in claws. Teeth out. Crouched down low like a chimp, ready to grab, ready to swing. And I was back in a corner again, just wearing track pants. He didn’t have the knife this time, though.

“When he came for me, I went limp, like I was too scared to move, and squeezed my eyes shut. Listened to his footsteps approach. Felt the creak of the bed as he stepped up on it. Felt his breath as he reached for me.

“I exploded. I’ve read books on women’s self-defense, and they talk about doing that, about exploding. You gather in all your energy and squeeze it tight, and then blamo boom, you explode. I was aiming for his soft parts: Balls. Eyes. Nose. Sternum. Ears. I’d misjudged where he was, though, so I missed most of my targets.

“And then he was on me, kneeling on my tits, hands at my throat. I bucked him but I couldn’t get him off. My chest and throat were crushed, my wings splayed out behind me. I flapped them and saw his hair move in the breeze. He was sweating hard, off his forehead and off his nose and lips. It was all so detailed. And silent. Neither of us made a sound louder than a grunt. Quieter than our sex noises. Now I wanted to scream, wanted to wake up Link and Natalie, but I couldn’t get a breath.

“I worked one hand free and I reached for the erection that I could feel just below my tits, reached as fast as a striking snake, grabbed it, grabbed his balls, and I yanked and I squeezed like I was trying to tear them off.

“I was.

“Now he was trying to get away and I had him cornered. I kept squeezing. That’s when he kicked me in the face. I was dazed. He kicked me twice more, and I ran downstairs and got a parka from the closet and ran out into the front yard and out to the park and hid in the bushes until morning.

“He was asleep when I came back in, after Natalie and Link had gone out. I found the knife beside the house and I went up to our room and I stood there, by the window, listening to you talk to them, holding the knife.”

She plumped herself on the cushions and flapped her wings once, softly, another puff of that warm air wafting over him. She picked up the tin robot he’d given her from the coffee table and turned it over in her hands, staring up its skirts at the tuna-fish illustration and the Japanese ideograms.

“I had the knife, and I felt like I had to use it. You know Chekhov? ‘If a gun is on the mantle in the first act, it must go off in the third.’ I write one-act plays. Wrote. But it seemed to me that the knife had been in act one, when Krishna dragged me into the bathroom.

“Or maybe act one was when he brought it home, after I showed him my wings.

“And act two had been my night in the park. And act three was then, standing over him with the knife, cold and sore and tired, looking at the blood crusted on his face.”

Her face and her voice got very, very small, her expression distant. “I almost used it on myself. I almost opened my wrists onto his face. He liked it when I… rode… his face. Like the hot juices. Seemed mean-spirited to spill all that hot juice and deny him that pleasure. I thought about using it on him, too, but only for a second.

“Only for a second.

“And then he rolled over and his hands clenched into fists in his sleep and his expression changed, like he was dreaming about something that made him angry. So I left.

“Do you want to know about when I first showed him these?” she said, and flapped her wings lazily.

She took the ice pack from her face and he could see that the swelling had gone down, the discoloration faded to a dim shadow tinged with yellows and umbers.

He did, but he didn’t. The breeze of her great wings was strangely intimate, that smell more intimate than his touches or the moment in which he’d glimpsed her fine, weighty breasts with their texture of stretch marks and underwire grooves. He was awkward, foolish feeling.

“I don’t think I do,” he said at last. “I think that we should save some things to tell each other for later.”

She blinked, slow and lazy, and one tear rolled down and dripped off her nose, splashing on the red T-shirt and darkening it to wineish purple.

“Will you sit with me?” she said.

He crossed the room and sat on the other end of the sofa, his hand on the seam that joined the two halves together, crossing the border into her territory, an invitation that could be refused without awkwardness.

She covered his hand with hers, and hers was cold and smooth but not distant: immediate, scritching and twitching against his skin. Slowly, slowly, she leaned toward him, curling her wing round his far shoulder like a blanket or a lover’s arm, head coming to rest on his chest, breath hot on his nipple through the thin fabric of his T-shirt.

“Alan?” she murmured into his chest.

“Yes?”

“What are we?” she said.

“Huh?”

“Are we human? Where do we come from? How did we get here? Why do I have wings?”

He closed his eyes and found that they’d welled up with tears. Once the first tear slid down his cheek, the rest came, and he was crying, weeping silently at first and then braying like a donkey in sobs that started in his balls and emerged from his throat like vomit, gushing out with hot tears and hot snot.

Mimi enveloped him in her wings and kissed his tears away, working down his cheeks to his neck, his Adam’s apple.

He snuffled back a mouthful of mucus and salt and wailed, “I don’t know!”

She snugged her mouth up against his collarbone. “Krishna does,” she whispered into his skin. She tugged at the skin with her teeth. “What about your family?”

He swallowed a couple of times, painfully aware of her lips and breath on his skin, the enveloping coolth of her wings, and the smell in every breath he took. He wanted to blow his nose, but he couldn’t move without breaking the spell, so he hoarked his sinuses back into his throat and drank the oozing oyster of self-pity that slid down his throat.

“My family?”

“I don’t have a family, but you do,” she said. “Your family must know.”

“They don’t,” he said.

“Maybe you haven’t asked them properly. When are you leaving?”

“Today.”

“Driving?”

“Got a rental car,” he said.

“Room for one more?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Then take me,” she said.

“All right,” he said. She raised her head and kissed him on the lips, and he could taste the smell now, and the blood roared in his ears as she straddled his lap, grinding her mons—hot through the thin cotton of her skirt—against him. They slid down on the sofa and they groaned into each others’ mouths, his voice box resonating with hers.