Read Online Further Joy by John Brandon - Free Book Online Page A

throwing something overboard. The juice was staining her fingertips. She had a feeling like she didn’t want to be let back into the fold. She didn’t know where she wanted to be, but the fold had nothing to offer her. She could feel conviction in herself, or perhaps the complete lack of it.
    Kim rose up on her hip and looked at Franklin, and he made a slow appraisal of the length of her. She could feel the blood moving in her feet. All the buttons of his polo shirt were undone now—she hadn’t seen him do that—and she could glimpse the top portion of his lean, soft-lined chest as it rose and fell. Kim could smell Franklin’s sweat and she could smell pollen and she could smell the air itself, the oxygen and ozone.
    â€œWhat do you want?” she said. “Tell me right now.”
    Franklin cleared his throat, sitting up a little and unclasping his hands.
    â€œWith this day. What are you after?”
    At long last, he seemed nervous. “I think I just wanted to be around you while I have the chance. I didn’t want us to miss our window and never connect.” He rubbed his eyes and looked off, as if into a vast and varied landscape. There was nothing around but Illinois. “My mom always used to say to be nice to you. Before you’d visit, she’d sit me down and say how important it was to be nice to you. Which of course I never paid much attention to. I don’t know what she was talking about—I guess that you’re not married or rich or whatever, and you live in Galesburg. I don’t know. But now I want to be nice to you, for my own reasons. I just think it would’ve been a travesty if we never knew each other.” He frowned then, in a tranquil way, contenting himself with his answer. His eyes were gazing out wisely from under those brushy lashes.
    Kim could feel a wind in her mind, blowing things away that she didn’t need. She closed in on Franklin and took hold of the scruff of his neck. She wasn’t going to say another word and wasn’t going to allow him to either. She’d talked herself into wanting so many things, and here was this pure,unbidden craving. The juice on her fingertips was leaving dark smudges on Franklin’s collar. She was reaching for his hair now, limp-looking but coarse, and he was moving toward her, meeting her. She felt the sensation of falling, but she was down on the ground already.

THE MIDNIGHT GALES
    T here’s a guy from New Mexico who arrived recently. He stays at a one-story motel over next to the power substation, and he makes no secret that he’s obsessed with aliens and that’s why he’s here. One of his T-shirts proclaims as much: OBSESSED . He’s got another shirt that says SITTING DUCK , and another that says MIDDLE SISTER . He spends a lot of time sitting next to the weed-cracked motel pool with his feet in the sun, a jug of iced tea underneath his chair. He wears colorful hats and a beard and his jug of tea has halved lemons floating in it. My father says that if this guy were any kind of respectable crazy he’d read library books all day, books that smelled like piss and hadn’t been checked out in ages, not glossy magazines full of cologne samples.
    We have no downtown, no police station or city hall of our own. There’s a concentration of dwellings near the highway, but it’s hard to say why. The highway is convenient to nothing. If you want to drive eight or nine miles down country roads, you have your pick of towns—franchise restaurants and car dealerships and jails. My parents rent a post office box in one ofthose towns, and hope not to get much mail. Occasionally my mom drives over for an out-of-the-way recipe ingredient or to see a movie in a theater.
    My parents have a system for me. Every other year I go with the rest of the kids to a school in Larsboro—that’s one of the nearby towns—and in the odd years I’m homeschooled. My mom