Read Online Naked, on the Edge by Elizabeth Massie - Free Book Online Page B

breakfast?" he asked.
    "My stomach hurts too much to eat. I don't got long, Ellie, I know that. This morning I'm in more pain then I been in for a long time. What you gonna do when I'm dead?"
    Elliott did not know what to say. And so he said, "Do you know where my crayons are?" "Your what?"
    "Crayons."
    "Crayons? Those things you had when you was little?"
    "Yeah."
    "Sure we throwed them away, Ellie. You ain't got time for crayons. I need you. You and me, we need each other, we's so sick."
    "I want to make a picture."
    "Make yourself useful. Vacuum the living room so Mrs. Anderson won't turn us in for neglect."
    “I want to make a picture. I'm better than Mosby Paulson, so much better you wouldn't believe it.
    "Go."
    Elliott vacuumed the living room. The large cat turds he pushed under the lawn chair because the vacuum nozzle wouldn't pick them up. He put the vacuum back into the living room closet and went into the kitchen. The windows were still closed, and through the glass he could see the wild and green weeds of his side yard.
    Horses eat wild, green weeds.
    Beyond the weeds was the neighbor's house, a blue trailer with a homemade deck on the front. Elliott knew that the Campbells lived there. They were old people, and they used to have two children, but the children were taken away to live in foster homes because the Campbells beat them up a lot. For the first time in the four years since the Campbell children were gone, Elliott wondered where they were.
    Maybe Pueblo, Colorado. Maybe Washington, D.C.
    Maybe across the ocean on a white sailboat.
    In a junk drawer, Elliott found several broken pencils and a knife. He sharpened the pencils with the knife and then drew a horse on a paper bag from under the sink. It wasn't as good a horse as one would have been had he had his crayons, but it was a fast horse. It ran with its mane and tail in the wind and its nostrils up to the air.
    He hid the picture in his bedroom. Then he watched T.V. until Mrs. Anderson came at two with her concrete smile and bright white coat and her chastisements and her nose that couldn't stop twitching at the smell of cat pee.
    Elliott's father woke him from his sleep on the sofa.
    On the console television, David Letterman was well into his monologue.
    "You snoring, boy," his father said.
    Elliott wiped his eyes and tried to sit up. "Was not."
    "Was too. You getting so goddamned fat you snoring like an old man. I wish to hell you was back at school where you belong."
    Elliott blinked and rubbed his eyes.
    "You can do jumping jacks, boy? Get up and show me a jumping jack."
    "I'm tired."
    "You's always tired. I work two goddamned jobs and you say you’s tired. Show me a jumping jack!”
    Elliott stood up and looked at his father. The man was short and dark and thin. His eyes were angry, dull chips in his skull. He worked at the cigarette factory in the day and the Exxon station at night. Elliott remembered his father saying once that he wished Mom would go ahead and die.
    It would be easier on us both, he had said.
    Elliott had cried at that, and crapped his pants, and his father had never said anything like that again.
    "Do it," said his father.
    Elliott jumped up and down three times, slapping his hands together over his head as he did. When he stopped, his heart was hammering, and his breath was glass in his throat.
    "I'm sick," he sputtered.
    "Hell you are."
    "I'm sick!" Elliott ran to his bedroom and cried and wet the bed. He didn't change the sheets until the next morning.
     
    E lliott got the mail from the mailbox. He stood on the stoop and sifted through the stack. There wasn't much today, just a folded Little Caesar's Pizza advertisement and a bill from the oil company. He looked through the untrimmed hedge bordering his yard at the Campbell's trailer. He wondered how beat up the Campbell children were when they finally got taken away.
    He went in and ate some Frosted Flakes from the box.
    He then fixed a bowl of red and green colored