Read Online The Cloaca by Andrew Hood - Free Book Online

not supposed to ever happen. Long story clipped, the girl was crazy for crack and wound up stabbing the little Frenchman in an unfatal place. This is the story I thought of, slowly following the woman into her old bedroom, my current one, preparing myself to either be fucked or stabbed.
    More cans of beer, these ones less organized; the ratty hand towel I had been messing nightly hung pathetically over the chair to dry; the pile of comics fallen and fanned out in the corner; a stack of sketchbooks on the desk, unopened after a week, a scattering of pens still uncapped; on the bedside table the pictures of Ames lounging on many different beaches in the same simple black bikini I had culled from the photo albums I found. The woman didn’t seem to notice any of this.
    â€œIt’s weird,” she said. “I don’t have any memories of being in here. I was never allowed to hang posters or anything. I wasn’t allowed to make it mine. My bedroom growing up was basically a guest room.” She walked around my room. There was a smell in there. I’d been in there a week and I had already left a smell distinct from the rest of the house, one of stale beer and body. Picking up the pictures of Ames, she flipped through them. “Beautiful,” she said. “Girlfriend?”
    â€œWas.”
    â€œI’m sorry,” she said by rote, looking still at the pictures. “Wherever these places are, I want to go there. And with a body like that .”
    On the bed, the flaps open, was the DVD player box I had found that morning, hidden on a shelf behind suits in Ames and Zebulon’s bedroom closet: pill bottles, nail clippers, the sharp kitchen knives, an antique pistol. In that first week, I hadn’t done one lick of cooking and so hadn’t noticed the lack of good knives, and my snooping hadn’t led me yet to the cleaned-out medicine cabinet.
    At the window she sighed, looking into the backyard. “Ohhh. There used to be trees out there. I don’t remember what kind of trees. But there were two big ones. Two big leafy ones. Why would your friends have removed them? They were lovely, leafy trees.”
    â€œI couldn’t say.”
    â€œI buried a time capsule back there. Not like actually a time capsule. A fucking box or something. When I was ten or something. I put pictures of myself and my friends in there. There were some poems in there and some mixtapes. I remember putting in a piece of paper with everyone I was in love with on it. God knows what else. If they dug up the tree, then they probably dug up that box.”
    â€œMakes sense.”
    â€œWhat would you do if you dug up something like that?”
    â€œWhat would I do?”
    â€œ You . I mean any -fucking-body. It would be pretty awesome to find something like that. To find all these things that a person hid about themselves, but to not know the person. I wonder what your friends must think of me from the stuff in that box.”
    Back in the foyer, I asked the woman if she had found what she was looking for. I hadn’t gotten her name, and I thought it was too late to ask. Now, through her dress, it looked like her shirt said SKULL .
    â€œI don’t know if I was looking for anything in particular. I just wanted to have a look. My mom died. I was in town for the funeral.”
    â€œI’m sorry.”
    â€œYeah,” she said. “It’s the price you pay for leaving the house. As my mom used to say.”
    Something about the way she was standing made her look like she was waiting to be hugged. She was looking at me like she wanted me to look at her, but I was only looking at her bare feet. Her toes were square and all the same length. The dark diamonds left by the straps were brown in a way that could have been either tan or dirt. I looked back up to her face. Probably she was just a few paces past thirty, probably the same age I was. People my own age still looked older than I was,