Fire Spirit Read Free Page A

freshly-landed fish.
    The laughing man poured vodka straight down her throat. It blazed all the way down her esophagus into her stomach, and when she tried to cry out, she breathed some of it into her lungs, so that she felt as if she were choking. The laughing man stood over her, waiting for her to finish coughing, but when she didn’t, he nodded to his companions again and he splashed even more into her mouth, regardless of her coughing and her spluttering.
    â€˜You may look just like her,’ he told her, ‘but you sure can’t take your booze the way she used to, and that’s a fact.’
    She retched and gasped for air, but he forced her to go on swallowing until the bottle was empty. He tossed it on to the floor, reached into his other coat pocket, and took out another bottle.
    â€˜ No !’ she screamed at him. ‘ I can’t ! You’re killing me !’
    â€˜Killing you? We’re not killing you. All we’re trying to do is show you a good time!’
    Scowling and Expressionless pulled her hair again and opened her mouth, and Laughing splashed almost half a bottle more down her throat.
    Eventually, however, they let her go, and she crouched on the mattress on her hands and knees, her stomach heaving, wheezing for breath. The men stood around her, watching her, saying nothing.
    â€˜Why are you doing this?’ she sobbed. ‘What have I ever done to you?’ She raised her head.
    The laughing man shrugged and said, ‘You never did nothing, sweetheart, except to be in the wrong location at the wrong time. For you , that is, anyhow.’
    He reached into his coat again, and this time he took out a pack of Marlboro cigarettes. He shook one out, tucked it into the slit in his mask, and lit it. When he blew smoke, it leaked out of his eyeholes as well as his mouth, so that it looked as if his head was on fire.
    He hunkered down in front of her and held out the lighted cigarette. ‘Here you are, take a drag on this. That should calm your nerves.’
    She shook her head. ‘I don’t smoke.’
    â€˜You’re still not getting it, are you? She smoked, so you got to smoke. This is an exorcism, don’t you understand? Everything that she did, you have to do. You have to be her. What’s the word . . . it’s symbolical.’
    He held the cigarette up to her mouth. She stared defiantly into his cockroach eyes, but he prodded it up against her lips again and again.
    â€˜You know you’re going to have to smoke it, don’t you?’ he told her. ‘Because if you don’t, I’m going to be obliged to stub it out in your eye, and you wouldn’t enjoy that too much, would you?’
    â€˜I hate you,’ she whispered.
    The laughing man nodded in appreciation. ‘That’s good,’ he said. ‘That’s excellent. That’s exactly the way that she used to talk. You’d be right on top of her, giving it everything you got, and she’d look you straight in the eye and say, “you scumbag, I wish you’d have a heart seizure, right here and now, so I could feel you die inside of me”.’
    He prodded her lips again, and this time she opened them a little so that he could insert the cigarette. The smoke drifted up into her eyes and stung them, and she started coughing again.
    He watched her for a while, and then he said, ‘Come on now, sweetheart, you got to inhale. Otherwise you don’t get that hit.’
    She hesitated, and then she breathed in. She managed to hold the smoke in her lungs for only a second before she exploded into another coughing fit. She coughed so hard that she bent forward and pressed her forehead against the mattress, as filthy and evil-smelling as it was.
    â€˜I’d say she needed a little more practice at that, wouldn’t you?’ said Scowling. ‘ She used to get through two packs a day, no trouble at all. Sometimes three.’
    The laughing