Read Online Hell by Robert Olen Butler - Free Book Online

says, “What did it get you, though, my darling Anne. Look at how it ended. Henry’s will was even stronger, and yet even he could never get what he wanted, and now he’s in Hell like everyone else.”
    She closes her eyes.
    Hatcher squeezes at his forehead. He himself has brought up Henry. “Why did I say that?”
    “Because you are powerless not to,” she says.
    But her voice is soft, and Hatcher says, “You’re not angry.”
    She thinks on this. She opens her eyes. “That’s true.”
    “And I’m not jealous, even having brought up the king.”
    Anne rises onto an elbow. “Render thyself naked now, Lord Hatcher, and come lie beside me. Quickly.”
    He throws off his shirt and his pants, working his way down toward merely skin.
    “No thinking,” Anne says. “Look me in the eyes.”
    He does. He does. And he is naked and he is beside her.
    Tonight the mattress is gravelly hard. He ignores this.
    They have gotten this far before.
    They both start to lift their arms to embrace and there is a clash of wrists and elbows. They stop and wait.
    “You start,” she says, falling onto her back and putting her arms alongside her, as if she were in a coffin.
    Hatcher twists around and slides an arm behind her at the shoulders, his hand vanishing there and instantly snagging on a coil of her unfurled hair. Anne gasps.
    “Sorry,” he says, withdrawing the arm quickly.
    “You’re pulling my hair,” she says.
    “Sorry.”
    “The headsman lifted me like that, just after.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    “Those very roots you just pulled. They held my head aloft.”
    “No remembering,” Hatcher says. “Look me in the eyes.”
    She turns her eyes to him.
    Hatcher slides his arm under her, farther down, at the shoulder blades. She shifts a little toward him and a shot of nerve pain runs from his elbow down his arm and into his hand. He gasps.
    “Did that hurt?” she says, lifting up. “I didn’t know.”
    He pulls his arm out.
    They both sit. They put their hands on each other, gingerly, at the shoulders. They are sweating. There is a sound from the alley. A voice.
    “Someone’s singing,” Anne says.
    “They’re weeping,” Hatcher says.
    “No,” she says. “Listen. There. ‘Pastime with good company, I . . .’ something ‘ . . . and shall until I die.’”
    “It’s a woman crying,” he says. “There. Hear that?”
    “Henry wrote that song, just after he became king.”
    “That little trilling sob.”
    “What was the word in the lyric? I what until I die?”
    “It sounds like Mary Ellen crying.”
    “I couldn’t hear.”
    “Listen.”
    And they both listen. But the alley is silent.
    They look at each other. Their hands are still on each other’s shoulders. For a moment, they’re not sure why.
    “We were trying,” Anne says.
    “Yes.”
    “I’m actually sleepy,” she says.
    “You’re never sleepy,” he says.
    “I am now.”
    They let go of each other, and they lie down, side by side.
    And soon Anne is asleep. To thrash and dream badly, of course.
    Then, rare as well, Hatcher falls asleep.
    And after a time, he rises to wakefulness from another rare thing. Indeed, a first for him in Hell. He is having an unmitigatedly good sexual feeling. He opens his eyes, and he is on his back and staring at the glowing filament of the bare lightbulb hanging above him. Instantly, he knows three things: he is awake, Anne is not beside him, and he is presently the recipient of an ardent and expert blow job. He closes his eyes again. He thinks briefly of his boyhood in Pittsfield: a shower nozzle, stove-warmed Vaseline on an oven mitt, an actual girl from a double-wide out along the Illinois River. But he is with a queen now. So he opens his eyes and lifts his head slightly and looks down his naked torso to Anne, her mouth working expertly, her beautiful eyes looking back up along his torso into his own. Then her eyes close and release his gaze, which drifts up and slightly to the left, and there, across the