Читать онлайн «Zero at the Bone»
Автор Jane Seville
Published by
Dreamspinner Press
4760 Preston Road
Suite 244-149
Frisco, TX 75034
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Zero at the Bone
Copyright © 2009 by Jane Seville
ISBN: 978-1-935192-80-0
Printed in the United States of America
First Edition
April, 2009
eBook edition available
eBook ISBN: 978-1-935192-81-7
A narrow fellow in the grass
Occasionally rides—
You may have met Him,—did you not,
His notice sudden is.
The Grass divides as with a Comb,
A spotted Shaft is seen,
And then it closes at your Feet
And opens further on—
He likes a Boggy Acre,
A Floor too cool for Corn—
But when a Boy, and Barefoot,
I more than once at noon,
Have passed, I thought, a Whip lash
Unbraiding in the Sun
When stooping to secure it
It wrinkled, and was gone—
Several of Nature's People
I know, and they know me—
I feel for them a transport
Of Cordiality—
But never met this Fellow
Attended or alone
Without a tighter Breathing
And zero at the bone.
—Emily Dickinson
CHAPTER 1
The smell of cheap motel rooms was comforting to him, like his oldest, rattiest T-shirt. Lysol, unwashed feet, and that sour tang of grime and desperation that tried to dress up and look nice with laundered sheets and those stiff bedspreads that felt like sandpaper on your ass, bargain basement art on the walls and the cheap paper-wrapped chits that weren’t so much soap as a suggestion of what soap might be like.
Motel rooms like this had known many men without names, but he wondered if he was the first who’d let his go by choice.
He signed a meaningless pseudonym to the register and paid cash. He could afford to stay in nicer places, but that would mean hauling out one of his impressive array of fake identifications, and he didn’t use them unless absolutely necessary. Each one, when used, left a shallow footprint in the shifting sand dunes of his existence, which he preferred to keep pristine and featureless. Even if that hadn’t been the case, he’d still prefer rooms like this. They fit around him snugly with the comforting security of anonymity. Every time he’d stayed in fancier digs he’d felt like he was rattling around in them like the last pea in the can. The eyes of the world could see him in places like that. Places like this, he could float through without leaving a trace, and the world’s eyes looked away.
