Read Online Unkillable by Patrick E. McLean - Free Book Online

people? There’s no such thing as spirits!”
    And when her rant was done, as she stood before her mother, proud and scared and shaking from the adrenaline that was coursing through her body. Her mother had said nothing. Marie wasn’t prepared for that. She was prepared for wailing and screaming and curses and a thousand other kinds of protest, but her mother just looked sad. “I’m leaving, Momma Oya, and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.”
    Marie stormed upstairs and slammed the door to her room. If she had waited, she would have seen her mother cry.
    The next day Marie got a pain in her stomach, one that wouldn’t go away. When she told her mother about it, her mother didn’t even look up. She just said, “You g’wan, you go that hospital. Let them scienstific fix you up.”
    Marie went back to her room and tried to sleep. But the pain wouldn’t let her. The pain grew worse and worse. Eventually she took herself to the emergency room. An MRI showed that her stomach was filled with tumors.
    That’s when she came to believe. When she realized that there was more to the world than could be measured or imagined. That’s when she realized that her mother would rather kill her than lose control.
    I would have thought that this story was complete and utter bullshit -- that this pretty girl was batshit crazy, except for one thing. At the table, there were four of us. Me, Bruce, Marie and squeezed in between Bruce and I, a large Haitian man, blacker than the underside of the dark side of the moon, who didn’t say much. In fact, he didn’t say anything at all.
    “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said, “but who is this guy?” I asked, jerking a mangled thumb at the comatose guy sitting next to me.
    “He doesn’t have a name. The Rat took it.”
    “The Rat took his name?”
    “That’s what made him like that. That’s what you gonna be like,” said Marie, deadly serious.”
    “You mean taller? And black?”
    “You joke.”
    Bruce jumped in, trying to impress the pretty girl, “C’mon, Dan, take this seriously.” The living, they’ll do anything to get laid.
    “I don’t have to take this seriously. If I take this seriously, it just sucks too much. Besides, you really think The Rat took somebody’s name?”
    “If Marie says so,” said Bruce.
    “Yeah, hard-on? What’d that rat grab the name by when he carried it away? This is bullshit, I’m calling him Bob.”
    Marie reached across the table and touched the man’s hand tenderly. “He saved my life.” She continued her story.
    After all the doctors had told Marie there was nothing that could be done -- that she had weeks to live and all that modern medicine could do was make her comfortable, Momma Oya came to visit. She brought The Nameless Man with her to carry her purse.
    As Marie lay back on the pillow, clutching the button that dispensed the morphine, and watching the world swim a little more with each hit, she saw the way things were for the first time. How all the men in Momma Oya’s life came and withered.
    With the clarity of vision reserved for those who have resigned themselves to death, she realized why her father had never come around. Why she never saw any of the many pretty young men who had been Momma Oya’s boyfriends. They were dead, all of them. Somehow Momma Oya sucked the power out of them and moved onto the next one. And if she would give her own daughter cancer to keep control, really, what was the death of a stranger compared to that?

    Momma Oya asked her daughter if she wanted to come home. Asked her daughter if she was willing to give up all this foolishness and become what she was destined to be. If she was, then Momma Oya would make the pain go away.
    Marie had never hated her mother more than at that moment. “No,” she said, “I’d rather die here, alone, then be with you.” Momma Oya just smiled.
    “I gwan an talk to des Doctor. You comin’ home with me. You should be with family at the end.” Momma Oya bared