Read Online Beautiful Sorrows by Mercedes M. Yardley - Free Book Online Page B

equally excited and annoyed.
    Death shrugged. “I show myself to whomever I choose.” Man, he was being suave today. Jill looked ready to pounce on him and drag him off to the Tunnel of Love.
    “And you choose to show yourself to me?” Jill batted her eyes.
    I turned to her in surprise. “You’re so flirting with him! You’re flirting with Death! My gosh, woman!”
    Jilly grabbed the axe from the ground and pointed it at me. “Shut up!” She swung it high over her head, but Death gently took it from her. He set it back on the ground, blade up. Jill looked confused.
    “I thought that you were here because I was going to kill her,” she said.
    “That’s why I came, yes,” Death told her. He took both of her hands in his. She didn’t flinch at the feel of cold bone.
    “So why won’t you let me?” she asked.
    Death shook his head almost angrily. “It would happen this way.”
    I felt my nerves start up again. What, he was going to let me die just because Jilly was crushing on him?! This was so unfair!
    I was just about to launch into an angry tirade voicing my opinion when Death stood perfectly straight and still. Darkness flowed into the room, and creepy little things chittered and scampered in the corners.
    “Wow,” breathed Jill, looking around.
    “Yeah, wow,” Death said, and then he touched Jill right between the eyes with his skeletal finger. Jill jerked and fell backwards.
    Onto the axe.
    “Well, there you go,” Death said cheerfully. The darkness subsided and he gave me a little wink. “I’ll start moving my stuff in.”
    I fought the chains. “But you can’t leave me here!” Dead cat lady. Dead Jilly. Dead creepy video store guy. And those were just the ones I knew about.
    “Take me with you!” I screamed.
    Death started for the stairs. “As much as I love to hear you say that, it’s not practical. What are you going to say? That Death unchained you? Come on. Scream until somebody finds you and then tell them that you kicked your roomie onto the axe. You’ll be fine.”
    “Death, you get back here right now!” I yelled. I could have killed him. Seriously.
    “That’s good. Keep that up, love. See you when the police find you,” he said, and then Death was gone.
    The bodies, however, weren’t.
    So I took his advice. I kept screaming.

 
    THE QUIET PLACES WHERE YOUR BODY GROWS

    Azhar’s little girl was found slowly, laboriously, in pieces.
    Her feet were flashing like diamonds in the creek. Tiny hands were strung from the stubby branch of the Crying Trees. Her head, eyes dark and her black pigtails shorn, was left in a field where curious wildflowers bent into her mouth. The torso was never discovered.
    Azhar had terrible dreams about what happened to his daughter’s young, dusky body, of what became of her heart. In the dreams, he stood playing a flashlight over the corpse of his sweet Sada while lightning splintered on the bleak horizon. Sometimes there was a monster. Sometimes there was a man. Sometimes he himself knelt down and ripped out his own daughter’s organs with his teeth. He was a man who had become a monster.
    He hoped they were only dreams.
    This was normal, his best friend at home said. Transference of guilt. Agony of a father who couldn’t protect his little one when she needed him most.
    “I told her that monsters didn’t exist,” Azhar explained to his friend over the phone. “I lied.”
    “Everybody tells their children that monsters don’t exist.” His friend’s voice was kind. They had known each other since they were infants. They had kicked a red ball in the dirt until it was stained and worn so thin that it had no choice but to deflate. His daughter had also been used until her skin could no longer contain her insides.
    “I lied,” Azhar repeated. He hung up the phone and never dialed that number again.
    America was a large land, a land where one could get lost. He lost his native dress, he lost his heart to a beautiful American woman, and he