Read Online Don't Kiss Me: Stories by Lindsay Hunter - Free Book Online

Your eyes stung, your cats moaned, it sounded like one long No. The man in the driveway jogged over and looked in. They were from Animal Control, you saw that now. You looked down at your feet, where a turd had appeared, curled over your big toe. The Indonesian man had once told you a story about how, fishing as a boy, he’d reeled in a diaper, how his father had made him pose for a picture with his catch. You remembered how the Indonesian man had pushed your hand when you’d reached for his elbow.
    The man in the sunglasses gagged, wondered in a whiny voice why lonely cat ladies were his problem. You wanted to hug him for saying so, for thinking it was loneliness made you what you was. Lonely was normal. Come in but mind the dunes, you told your visitors.

 
     
    RV PEOPLE
     
    We’re in the RV. Someone coughs like a baby’s rattle. One of us left the last time we stopped for gas. We were in the aisles of the convenience store looking for sausages, air fresheners, some kind of prophylactic. We are the type to look for things. Then one of us was gone, we saw him walking slowly toward the highway, and some of us watched while he turned against the flow of traffic, and some of us watched when he got into another car, and some of us watched the glint on the windows of that car, light flashing on the windows like some kind of magic trick, and we turned back to our aisles, we turned back to the rest of us, and we paid for the gas and lifted some candies and passed them around us when we were back in the RV. A few of us looked around and asked after the one that left, for them it was like poof, he was gone, did he have ash blond hair, did he prefer to drive in the afternoons? No one answered and we were back on the road anyway.
    Later one of us mentions the heat, we’re in the desert now, we don’t remember how or why we headed in that direction, we breathe the dry heat in and try to remember to let it back out. A few of us work tying knots in a rope, tying a cat’s paw, then a clove hitch, then a half blood. Tying, untying. Someone ties a noose and we look away for a while, we can feel her eyes on us but we don’t look, she needs to learn. We hit a bump and stop, back up, hit the bump again. Someone in the front says, Had to make sure it was dead, and we sit while some of us are out there cutting it up, discarding what we don’t want, making neat cuts we can all agree on. When we get going again the meat is stowed in the cooler, we are running low on ice and we worry about the keep, some of us worrying the blood on our fingers, using our mouths before it can dry, but it’s hard to get under the nails just right.
    We drive all the night, keeping each other company. We say things about the abundance of stars, so much light, but we don’t really care for stars, there are other things to notice, like woodgrain, like a sheet on the line, like the tender parts of the naked among us, like the smell of anything after it’s cut into. Some of us shuffle cards, deal them out, we make piles of cards, they are worn like dollars now, a two of clubs gives out, crumbles in our laps, we push the bits onto the floor, some of us collect the bits later on.
    At an all-night diner we pick up more of us, some of us are convincing enough to get a waitress to leave her pad and apron behind, some of us are lonely enough to take a woman and her baby. The woman cries all night long, even when we make soothing noises, even when we hand her our treasures: two river stones, silver foil, a braid of hair. We take her baby from her, we pass it forward, we rock it in our arms.
    Close to dawn we drive off the road, into the desert. We park and arrange ourselves to sleep. Some of us are on the dining bench. Some of us lie on the floor, stomach to back, half to half, so there is enough room. Some of us take the bed in the back, touch each other in the agreed-upon way. Some of us cry out and are ashamed. We close our eyes. We open them hours later. Two have