Read Online The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories by Ethan Rutherford - Free Book Online

cigarette, and lit it. “That vet’s an asshole. You shouldn’t have to do this alone.”
    “He couldn’t be bothered with it until after Christmas, apparently,” Thomas said. “Joan and I talked about it. It doesn’t seem right to wait that long. This is something we can do. Something I can do. He’s in pain. We discussed it.”
    “You want me to come?”
    Thomas looked at the alpaca. “It’s going to be messy, I think,” he said.
    Sarah snorted. “You don’t know messy. Try the ER. Try arterial blood. Try a bunch of maniac drunks trying to kill each other in the waiting room. Blood doesn’t bother me.” She smiled, and looked at him. “As you know.”
    “We,” Thomas said, “your legion of lucky patients.”
    “Lucky indeed. That’s me. Dr. Luck. That’s what I’ll be called.”
    “It’s going to be cold,” Thomas said. “And probably awful. I can handle it.”
    “Let’s not worry about it,” Sarah said. She stubbed her second cigarette on top of the first. “I don’t have much else to do. I’ll get my coat.”
    As she disappeared back into the garage, Thomas hushed the sick animal into the trailer and closed the gate behind him. Zachary nestled down in the center of the trailer as he had in the field, as if, Thomas thought, he knew the sort of remoteness required of him now. Thomas could hear Sarah clomping up the garage steps, heard her door closing. He looked up to her window—he’d wave her off, say thanks but forget it—but the shade was drawn. Maybe her company would be welcome after all. It would prevent him, at least, from thinking too much about John. He dropped his keys in the cab of his truck, went back inside the house. He yelled good-bye up the stairs to Joan, and retrieved one of his shotguns out of the gun cabinet on the first floor. When he came back, Sarah was already sitting in the passenger seat, and the two of them drove, with the sick alpaca, out of the driveway, and away from the house.
    S uicide, Ma, John had said on the phone to Joan three months ago . Don’t you ever think about it? Once she heard this, the receiver she’d been holding to her head had suddenly turned heavy and cold on her ear. John had been talking about his new obsession: the death of a childhood hero, a musician who’d stabbed himself in the heart, collapsed in a bathtub, and hadn’t been found for seven days. That guy, he had the whole world in his hands. And decided to end it. So tell me what I’ve got? Why are you so sure I’m going to pan out? He went on, digressing here and there, grandstanding, and backtracking. It was manipulative talk, but John had always had a bit of that in him. This conversation was different, both aimless and purposeful, and she didn’t recognize where it was coming from. It felt stagey, mobilized to elicit a response which, she knew from past experience, would only send him further down his own private rabbit hole. Nothing she said was ever “right”; nothing she’d ever said to John had been “right.” Her therapist had told her she ought to take the things her son said both seriously (engage with the ideas presented) and not seriously (not to let those ideas infect their relationship). What relationship? she’d wanted to say. I’m a life-support machine here, all tubes and knobs. Fuzzed-out beeps, posing as sentences with a life of their own.
    They hadn’t done much to John’s room since he’d left for college, and Joan now stood leaning against the doorframe, looking in, as if there were an invisible line in the carpet that separated where he’d slept from the rest of the house. The posters he’d put on the walls with rubber cement still hung slightly off center; the news articles he’d carefully clipped and pinned to his bulletin board, though yellowed now with age and brittle, were undisturbed. He’d wanted it kept that way. This was the room where they talked to him during the night. Or, rather, where Thomas talked to him. After long