Read Online Exquisite Corpse by Poppy Z. Brite, Deirdre C. Amthor - Free Book Online Page B

windows at zebra-striped vinyl raincoats, at Dr. Marten boots done up in purple glitter, at lace body stockings for all sexes—and at the gaudiest, prettiest things of all, their own reflections in the glass.
    Below the neck these children wore black, gray, and white garments of various materials and textures, held together with bits of metal. Above the neck they were like abstract paintings done in furious rainbow hues. A technicolour scribble of tortured hair, great panda-smudges of azure or chartreuse round the eyes, a slash of vermilion across the soft young mouth, and off they went.
    I used to envy these kids their freedom, even if all it meant was living off Mum and Dad or on the dole. They could look like strange crosses between birds of paradise and walking corpses if they so desired. They could spit on the sidewalk, lounge insolently where they were not wanted, make rude remarksto the tourists who gawped at them. They could be as conspicuous as they liked. They never had to blend in anywhere, and never cared to try.
    It was these children, indirectly, who caused me to quit my last civil service job three months before I was arrested. I had a position behind a desk at the Metropolitan Water Board. The English civil service; allows a man to rise to his highest level of incompetence; I had already been dismissed from three or four such positions, but they were perfectly willing to hire me on again and see how long I might last at this one. They knew vaguely that I was intelligent and could type, and my work history showed that I would perform the job flawlessly right up until the moment I told some petty supervisor or other to stuff it as far as it would go.
    But one day very much like this, when autumn nipped the city and the sky was a rare, clear blue, I looked at the stack of meaningless papers on my desk and the balled-up wrapper of the greasy takeaway chicken I’d eaten an hour ago, when they said I could, even though I was always hungry well before that. I listened to the conversations unspooling around me, and I heard dialogue straight out of a Joe Orton play (“How dare you involve me in a situation for which no memo has been issued”). I thought of a boy I’d seen in the King’s Road the night before, his black hair teased wild, his smile open and easy and free. Quite possibly he didn’t have the price of a meal in his pocket, but nobody could tell him when he might or mightn’t eat one. Very quietly but very firmly, something in me rebelled.
    I stood. I dropped the greasy wrapper in the rubbish can; I never thought anyone else should have to clean up after me. And I left that office forever. No one spoke to me, no one saw me go. I spent the rest of the day in Chelsea, drinking in the pubs. I watched the kids prance up and down eyeing one another (and, most often, finding one another sadly deficient). I spoke to no one. I brought no one with me when I staggered home. There were already two I had to get rid of, one crumpledin the wardrobe beginning to bloat, the other still fresh enough to share my bed.
    I had no prospects at the time, only a small savings account and an insatiable appetite for killing boys. As it turned out, this was all I would require to get me through those last few months. But the wild children of Leicester Square would not serve my purposes today. I needed someone less conspicuous, more anonymous; in short, someone more closely resembling myself.
    Most of all, though, I needed a drink.
    I slipped into the stream of humanity on Charing Cross Road, succumbed to an irresistible impulse and ducked into a bookshop to scan the true crime section. I was the subject of three garish paperbacks: jackets the colour of fresh blood and fleeting love, well-thumbed central photo inserts documenting my bath, my bedroom closet, my kitchen knives, the stairs leading up to my flat, all with breathless captions (“Twenty-three men climbed these stairs, never expecting it