Read Online Valley of Bones by Michael Gruber - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Michael Gruber
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antipsychotics and a pat on the back. Sooner or later he will kill someone, and after a good deal of passing forms similar to the one Lorna now slips intoher out box, Florida will kill him by lethal injection. This evil was not in her department, however, and she had learned to confine her thoughts to zones affecting personal action. She declares him unfit to stand trial, signs the form, and now it is time for lunch.
The ladies’ room in the facility is tiny, as befits an institution (the Jail) run and populated almost entirely by men. After using the toilet (and wasn’t a capacious bladder essential to doing psychological work in the public sector!), she checks herself out in the spotted mirror. Fawn cotton suit, pale gray knit underneath, unobtrusive. The mad do not like screaming colors, or so she justifies her taste, but she has dressed in such shades since long before she became a demi-shrink. Girl, why you want to look like some dead leaf? Her pal Sheryl. She is going to have lunch with Sheryl today, in fact, and she knows Sheryl will make a comment of that type. Look like a damn tree. To please Sheryl, she carefully applies rather more makeup than is her usual wont. Eye shadow barely blue, mascara on her pale lashes, blusher, darkish lipstick, matte. She does not really need the blusher because she has flawless skin. Her best feature, she thinks, although “she has beautiful skin” is what they always say of fat, unattractive girls.
As she was. As she sometimes still thinks she is. She is tall, and has to stoop a little to get her face in the mirror. She will retain part of this stoop when she leaves the ladies’ room, for it is her habitual posture. Stand up straight, her father was always telling her, but here as in so many other aspects of life she had not been a dutiful daughter. She walks with her broad shoulders rolled slightly forward and her neck drooping slightly from the vertical. This is to hide her breasts, which are large and round. Jutting, as the pulp writers like to say. She has also a defined waist, and broad hips, which she conceals with her suit jacket. This she removes briefly to dab her underarms with industrial strength antiperspirant. Lorna was not made for the tropics, and once again a vagrant query registers in her mind: why does she stay here? Again, no answer, for the answer is inertia. Although she is courageous in defense of self and her prerogatives, she fears change.
Her other good feature is her hair, which is long, silky, honey-colored. She knows she should cut it into a sensible shape, but she resists this and wears it instead pulled back in a troublesome French knot. She adjusts this now and tucks back the various pennants that have come loose. Jacket back on, a final frowning inspection. A century ago, Lorna Wise would have stopped traffic in any large city of the western world, teams of horses would have run wild through shop windows, and even fifty years before she would have been considered Marilynesque, but now she is 180 degrees out of fashion, and women are required to resemble seventeen-year-old male basketball players. Lorna has what she thinks of as good feminist credentials, but her conviction stops at her skin. So she dresses subfusc and stoops.
Stooping then, she leaves the bathroom and the building, waving to Ernesto in his security window on her way out. Ernesto sighs with desire as he watches the sway of her fine ass, but Lorna does not hear this, and would not have appreciated it if she had, not because of any class or ethnic bias (from which she is remarkably free) but because she has only ever been attracted to men who want her to lose weight. All her psychological training has not hipped her to this catastrophic twist of taste.
Outside it is, of course, hot and humid, although not as hot and humid as it will be in a few hours. It is late September, still summer in Miami, and the city yearns for the relief of tourist season. She crosses to the shady side of
The ladies’ room in the facility is tiny, as befits an institution (the Jail) run and populated almost entirely by men. After using the toilet (and wasn’t a capacious bladder essential to doing psychological work in the public sector!), she checks herself out in the spotted mirror. Fawn cotton suit, pale gray knit underneath, unobtrusive. The mad do not like screaming colors, or so she justifies her taste, but she has dressed in such shades since long before she became a demi-shrink. Girl, why you want to look like some dead leaf? Her pal Sheryl. She is going to have lunch with Sheryl today, in fact, and she knows Sheryl will make a comment of that type. Look like a damn tree. To please Sheryl, she carefully applies rather more makeup than is her usual wont. Eye shadow barely blue, mascara on her pale lashes, blusher, darkish lipstick, matte. She does not really need the blusher because she has flawless skin. Her best feature, she thinks, although “she has beautiful skin” is what they always say of fat, unattractive girls.
As she was. As she sometimes still thinks she is. She is tall, and has to stoop a little to get her face in the mirror. She will retain part of this stoop when she leaves the ladies’ room, for it is her habitual posture. Stand up straight, her father was always telling her, but here as in so many other aspects of life she had not been a dutiful daughter. She walks with her broad shoulders rolled slightly forward and her neck drooping slightly from the vertical. This is to hide her breasts, which are large and round. Jutting, as the pulp writers like to say. She has also a defined waist, and broad hips, which she conceals with her suit jacket. This she removes briefly to dab her underarms with industrial strength antiperspirant. Lorna was not made for the tropics, and once again a vagrant query registers in her mind: why does she stay here? Again, no answer, for the answer is inertia. Although she is courageous in defense of self and her prerogatives, she fears change.
Her other good feature is her hair, which is long, silky, honey-colored. She knows she should cut it into a sensible shape, but she resists this and wears it instead pulled back in a troublesome French knot. She adjusts this now and tucks back the various pennants that have come loose. Jacket back on, a final frowning inspection. A century ago, Lorna Wise would have stopped traffic in any large city of the western world, teams of horses would have run wild through shop windows, and even fifty years before she would have been considered Marilynesque, but now she is 180 degrees out of fashion, and women are required to resemble seventeen-year-old male basketball players. Lorna has what she thinks of as good feminist credentials, but her conviction stops at her skin. So she dresses subfusc and stoops.
Stooping then, she leaves the bathroom and the building, waving to Ernesto in his security window on her way out. Ernesto sighs with desire as he watches the sway of her fine ass, but Lorna does not hear this, and would not have appreciated it if she had, not because of any class or ethnic bias (from which she is remarkably free) but because she has only ever been attracted to men who want her to lose weight. All her psychological training has not hipped her to this catastrophic twist of taste.
Outside it is, of course, hot and humid, although not as hot and humid as it will be in a few hours. It is late September, still summer in Miami, and the city yearns for the relief of tourist season. She crosses to the shady side of
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