So when are you moving out? You said last night you wanted to move out, Lightbulb says.
Square Peg says he doesn’t really want to move out, that he was just desperate.
Square Peg wishes things would be different is all, but Square Peg’s mind is all BSOD and he couldn’t describe different to save a life.
Lightbulb says a few more things.
Square Peg has to leave for work.
Traffic is light.
Square peg is driving obsidian to the slaughterhouse. It’s still dark outside, a November dark that swallows headlights and streetlights, and the windows keep fogging up.
Obsidian is crying and they’re stuck behind a truck in the slow lane and traffic keeps passing them. Square peg says, “it’s all my fault.”
He remembers a time back in college sitting in a middle lane at a red light in the passenger seat of a friend’s Barracuda, stoned, while fire trucks passed them on either side, red lights flashing and sirens everywhere.
Now that’s getting passed.
This is nothing here, square peg thought.
“I just have the bad habit of rushing you in the morning,” square peg said. “I’ve done that all your life. I have to stop doing that.” He tried to explain.
Obsidian kept crying. She cried all the way to the slaughterhouse.
Where is this going?
I sleep at odd hours, to avoid your dreams; I’m not usually out at this time. It’s midnight and I’m surprised to see some of the neighbors are still up, their house lights still burning.
But the streets are empty as I head out of the village. I stagger a little as I walk down the sidewalk.
Butterneck. Jesus.
She just laughed and finished cleaning her revolver and put it back into the box.
You’ve been talking to my mom, I said.
She locked the box and threw away the key, which was good because just that morning I’d gotten out of bed and made my coffee in the dark, heavy with the knowledge that if I had a gun, I’d stand in front of my easel and finally get something interesting on the canvas.
Just that morning I’d been complaining to my wife about having no friends; then of course three sent me nice emails at work, and now here I was having sushi with another friend.
“I don’t know why,” she said. “I just enjoy humiliating people. Is that the word? Humiliate? Insult, whatever. It’s just the way I am.”
If it weren’t a workday and if you weren’t sick I’d build you an igloo.
Blake ran the Zipper: sometimes the throttle, but mostly he locked people into the cages and let them out again when it was over. In his camper he had a whole shoebox full of crack pipes and hash pipes and so on that had fallen out of people’s pockets. He picked them out of the grass or gathered them from the cages after the people got out.
he thought she would ask directions
and considered flirtatious answers
she was pretty
In that apartment up there a young bank clerk read an architecture glossy, and in that one across there a DJ drank Cointreau on ice with a sales clerk from the “Gap” and brushed a manicured index finger along the downy hairs of her ear until she shivered. Next door a man read a box of medicine a Chinese man had given him.