Blue Light Read Free

said to no one. “Blue snake.”
    Mrs. MacMartin, the social director, screamed and threw up her hands. Winch shot her, hoping for more blue light — but none came. Roger Pliner, Felicity Burns, Bright Williams, Chas Twill — all dead by Winch’s gun.
    “Old lady!” he yelled. “Come on out! I don’t wan’ the money! I wan’ the light is all!”
    The snake had swallowed his mind by the time the police came. Winch knelt amid the corpses in the parking lot. It wasn’t yet fully night when the flashlights hit him.
    “Put down the gun!”
    Winch held out the pistol in submission, thinking the voice was his mother’s. But the police mistook the gesture. He didn’t hear the shots. The first bullet took him in the right lung. Then one in the ankle as he rose up on one leg. In his right thigh, through his ear, in the left hand, the right shoulder, the lower intestine. Every wound a blue ember burning hot and bright. Winch Fargo smiled at the fires only he could see. They burned long after his mind closed down.
    At her rented house in the Oakland Hills, in the backyard, Claudia Zimmerman was on top of Marcus. His eyes closed, a big grin on his loose lips. She moved up and down, wondering what it would be like to feel as good as he did. Her dog, Max, poked his nose into the cleft of Claudia’s buttocks. It tickled. On the back porch her husband, Billy, was with Marcus’s wife in the hot tub. She heard Franny yelping, Yes, yes, yes.
    Grabbing Claudia by the wrist, Marcus groaned, “Oh, yeah.”
    It hurt and she swayed back against his fast thrusts, aware of Max’s cold nose and lapping tongue against her rectum and of the blue light as she looked up in the sky.
    Suddenly all she wanted was Marcus.
    “Fuck it harder!” she yelled at the pudgy paper salesman. Max began to howl.
    Claudia dug her nails into Marcus’s fat shoulders and he screamed. She hunkered down on him and ground his hips into the grass.
    “Harder!” she yelled.
    He called out again, not from pleasure.
    Lights came on in the house up the hill.
    She didn’t remember Billy and Franny coming down to see why Marcus was screaming. She didn’t remember Marcus hitting her in the chest and face with his fists in a vain attempt to push her off. All she knew was Max’s howling. His yowl a clear blue note deep in her body — a promise of rapture that the fool Marcus couldn’t even imagine. There were explosions in her mind every time she thrust down on him. There was the taste of blood as she tore off his right nipple with her teeth. And then weightlessness as Billy and Franny pulled her off Marcus, and then the cold water of the unheated swimming pool. Blue water and blue cold — Marcus’s spongy nipple between her back molars.
    Horace LaFontaine lived for eight months and then died on the top floor of his sister’s house on Laramie in West Oakland. His sister, Elza, had taken him in when he’d come down with lung cancer. She fed him and shaved him, cut his toenails, and teased the hard feces out of his rectum when he was too weak to move his own bowels. She read to him late at night in words that he had once understood. Now the words were merely sounds, unrecognizable except for the timbre of his sister’s voice. That commanding voice he’d known as a youth in the black slums of Houston.
    The only thing he’d known for a while was the feeling of falling out of the sky, like a lazy leaf butting up against gusts of air as it goes. The ground was his last stop, and falling was all that was left of his life.
    Elza’s husband, Gregory, didn’t care about Horace. He was supposed to come up and see after his brother-in-law twice every night while Elza was off at work, but Gregory stayed downstairs drinking beer and watching the TV.
    Horace didn’t mind. The sight of anyone moving made him dizzy. The sound of anything but his sister’s voice gave him frights.
    He lay there, propped up on his pillows to keep the fluid in his lungs from drowning him.