Read Online Man With a Squirrel by Nicholas Kilmer - Free Book Online

me?’ God. She’s done so well with the Learning to Love the Body You Have series. I can’t imagine Ophelia Finger’s really got designs on the mystic realm now, do you?”
    â€œMost everything mystifies me. I spent half my day looking at a captive squirrel and thinking about a dead man’s feet.”
    â€œDead feet?”
    â€œThe ones in the painting. Since it’s over two hundred years old, I figure my guy croaked.”
    â€œGood. All this cult talk,” Molly said. She kissed the top of Fred’s head—the bristle of dark hair he kept short so it needed no brushing. “I started seeing dark woodses and dancing divils. I’m going upstairs. I thought you meant the old person Blanche Maybelle Stardust found by the river.”
    â€œNo, I was talking art,” Fred said. “Nothing but good old art.”
    *   *   *
    â€œThat goddamned Ophelia,” Molly said later, curled into Fred in her bed. “I’ll tell you what I hate, Fred.”
    Fred became more awake. Molly’s house was far enough from Spy Pond so you couldn’t see water, except from the roof peak. Nonetheless, tonight watery darkness lapped against Molly’s bedroom windows. There was no star- or moonlight, only a furry dusk that allowed Fred to make out Molly’s dresser and the mirror over it; the open door to the new bathroom, which had once been a closet or a borning room; the bedroom walls, papered with cornflowers and pinks in vertical swags. Fred’s presence in the house was betrayed only by his bulk in Molly’s bed and the clothes he kept in the smaller of Molly’s two clothes closets.
    Fred put a palm on the warm round of Molly’s knee where it pushed against his stomach. She was wearing the white shirt he’d taken off. “What do you hate, Molly?”
    â€œThe stories were all about how these grown-ups were betrayed in childhood by their minister or their parents or the head of the PTA.”
    â€œThere are hideous people in the world,” Fred said.
    â€œI gather the new book is full of them—but I’m not so impressed by the stories,” Molly said. “Though a tale about how a fifty-year-old woman was almost sacrificed to death on an altar of sin by her father, the respected symphony conductor who’s been dead twenty years—and who would have guessed he had that much spare time for a hobby?—it suggests an interesting tide of revisionism.”
    â€œAnd may be hard on the old man,” Fred observed. “Except he’s deader than my guy’s feet.”
    â€œNo, what I hate,” Molly said, stroking a hand absently down Fred’s chest and fingering a nipple, “is that all of it sounds like the wisdom of the four-year-old, with heavy guns backing it up.”
    â€œMm,” Fred said.
    â€œI remember Sam convinced, at about four, that his mother—that was me—had been replaced by a witch who looked exactly like me. Imagine if at that point he’d had the benefit of a kindly chorus gathering around him wearing capes and chanting, ‘You’re right, kid.’”
    They listened to a spasm of rain attacking the windows and crossing the roof. “I know it’s only March, but if something green doesn’t happen out there pretty soon,” Molly said, “I’m not going to be responsible.” Her questing fingers rested on the scar under Fred’s left shoulder. She was getting used to his scars, telling him he was battered like any old tree that doesn’t know to stand farther from the driveway. “It feels like another nipple,” Molly said.
    â€œA witch’s tit,” Fred said.
    â€œI was amazed,” Molly said. “For all I’ve railed and raged against organized religion, I have to say it beats the disorganized kind.”
    â€œI’ll tell you, Molly,” Fred said, sliding his hand along Molly’s