Read Online Scowler by Daniel Kraus - Free Book Online

her, he glimpsed the white mattress and saw the dotted red outline of her perforated body. It was the residue of a person left behind; this new woman holding him was whole.
    “Gather your sister,” she said.
    Difficult to do, with a baseball bat in one hand and shears in the other, but gather her he did as his mother dressed and hurried downstairs. Barest essentials—bottles, medicine, diapers—were stuffed into a bag. Ry’s main job was to carry the weapons, but the bat was eerily smooth and kept slithering from his grip like an eel. It would require both hands. He slid the shears into his back pocket.
    His mother’s coat was unzipped when she ran outside. Ry heard the sputter of the car engine cranking, heard it die. Bile surged up his esophagus—it wouldn’t start; they would never make it. When he heard it catch he almost sobbed. Jo Beth knew the vehicle’s quirks as well as anyone; in weather like this it needed five minutes minimum to warm up or it would die before making it past the driveway. Ry set Sarahon the floor and began lacing his boots. They were leaving. It was happening. The knot got sloppy and Ry had to start over.
    Jo Beth burst in, grabbed Sarah’s shoes, coat, snow pants, and hat, then dropped them in a pile in front of the two-year-old and went to work. Ry knew from experience that it took several minutes to dress Sarah. That meant there was time to save something that mattered to him alone. He hurried through the dining room and entered his bedroom. Every object cried out for mercy but he felt a masculine disregard for their pleas. Ry took to his knees and reached under the bed.
    But when he picked up the box it wilted, and the “Corn Flakes” stamped on its side accordioned into a nonsense of consonants. Ry dropped it on the bed before the bottom gave way. There was no way this box was going to make it. He felt the snotty choke of a child’s stubborn determination. This was his birthday, Christmas, and the last day of school put together. He would not be denied.
    “Let’s go.” His mother clapped from the kitchen. “Now, Ry.”
    “Wait!” He took the box and dumped the toys onto the quilt. Hypnotized by chrome and rubber and painted faces and sculpted muscle, Ry found choice an impossibility.
    “Meet us outside,” Jo Beth warned. The front door creaked. “We’re leaving.”
    Ry sunk his hands into the pile and felt the loving bite of fake weaponry and robot circuitry, the prickly scruff of stuffed animal. He shoved a handful into his coat pocket. Another handful into the opposite pocket. One, two, three more crammed down his left pants pocket and four jammed down the right. The ridges of plastic faces, of posable arms, of hands with notches for accessories—they excited his fingers,were the very textures of joy. He could not stop now. Several more characters went into his underwear.
    He heard what sounded like a car door. No, not yet! A sob tore through his shoulders and he swiped up the baseball bat and turned away. Action figures ground against his groin as he dashed through the dining room. He banked through the kitchen, kicked through the back door, and rushed across the porch, feeling like a toy himself—stiff and operating with the simplest of jointed limbs.
    Leaping down the stairs, he expected to find the car idling in the driveway, Sarah waving at him from the backseat. It was not there and Ry wondered if he had been left behind. Then he saw the creep of exhaust from the garage and realized they had yet to make it out. Ry ducked under the clothesline and came upon the car. It chugged dutifully. There was no one in it.
    He turned at the sound of voices and saw, thirty feet to his left and near the junk shed, his mother scuttling backward across the snow with Sarah clutched in her arms. A purring truck blocked the narrowest stretch of driveway and Marvin Burke stood in front of it, boots planted, overalls poking from his wool coat, green stocking cap sitting comically low