Read Online Cage's Bend by Carter Coleman - Free Book Online

smelled the fumes. The Vanderbilt counselors were buffoons. They thought I should ride it out. I should never have been there. My grades steadily declined, then fell off a cliff. Toward the end I was unraveling. Stayed in my apartment for two weeks and made soup for myself and read an Elvis biography and thought I was watching the hair fall out of my head every time I looked in the mirror and no one at school even asked where I was. For an international marketing class we had to get a partner or a group of people to do a presentation. I got together with another misfit, a guy from China, and we did this thing on selling crematoriums because they had so many people over there who were dying. Macabre. He used to sell them. I got up in front of the class and couldn’t remember what I was saying. We were supposed to be addressing the class as if we were addressing the board of directors of a company to ask for money to do marketing R&D. I had all these prepared notes in front of me and I couldn’t think of anything to say. I couldn’t organize my thoughts. I finally just put my notes down and said, Look, all I really want is forty dollars from the board so I can buy this directory of international business. The class started howling and the professor reached in his pocket and pulled out two twenties. In front of this whole big group of people. Everybody was laughing at me.
    A cold wind stirs the curtains. I stand up to close the window and gaze at the moon. I can remember Vanderbilt a year and a half ago, I can remember two weeks ago, but I can’t remember where I was this morning. I try and try but I only see the graphs on the walls and smell the dizzying fumes.
Where was I this morning?
I scream silently. I walk barefoot around the room looking for a clock and the ticking draws me to a heap of clothes and I find it under them. Eight-thirty. It’s only just night. Why were we sleeping? I’m wide awake now. I pick up my pants and find something in my pocket, the bulletin from St. Paul’s, and I remember the morning with relief—like discovering your location after wandering around lost in the woods for hours.
    I laugh and Sylvia mumbles from the bed. From the church I’d run right back here. We’d started tripping around three in the morning, seven hours before the service. I haven’t slept much the last month, only a few hours a night, and I was exhausted and crawled right back in bed and slept for eight hours. Now I’m refreshed. Ready to rip. Lock and load.
    “What are you laughing at?” Sylvia sits up, the sheets sliding down to her belly, revealing her teardrop breasts.
    “My sermon.” I crawl beside her. “I don’t know what possessed me. Maybe the Holy Ghost.”
    Sylvia smiles. “It was impressive.”
    I kiss her breasts for a long time. She arches her back. I wrap one arm around her thin waist, pull our bodies together. We seem to melt into each other. I trace my tongue down her belly, along the blades of her hips until she is grinding her ass slowly.
    “Fuck me,” she says.
    I slide inside her, get up on my toes so my pelvis is pressing against her clitoris.
    “I love your cock.”
    “I love being inside you.”
    Her breathing grows heavier. She lifts her head and licks my chest. I’m getting too excited, so I picture the waves lapping the shore, skidding back to sea, and rolling back to the beach until she is breathing fast, yelling, “Kill me. Kill me. Oh, kill me!”
    I rise up on my arms, drive myself in and out of her, watching her face tense. Then she moans and her body goes slack, her eyes roll up so only white shows through the slits of her lids. A woman’s face is most beautiful immediately after coming, flushed and soft, radiant. I watch the flickering transformation, then pull her legs up in the air, her knees behind her head, and hammer my flanks between her thighs, borne on a furious rush, a wind howling up a mountainside, the promise of reaching a new summit, the ultimate peak, a