GRAVEWORM Read Free Page A

staring.
    Now she moved to another window. She kept looking. The girl wondered if she saw her. Old people did not see well, yet this old lady seemed to be looking right at her.
    Now she came outside.
    The girl could smell her and it was a sour, old lady smell like wilted lilacs and mentholated rubs and skin creams. It was a smell of age and ruin, withering life fighting against the purity of death. Not a good smell. Not a vibrant smell or even a cold marble smell like the girl so enjoyed.
    Bowing her head, the girl smelled herself.
    She stank of rancid soil and dead leaves and shit.
    She ran her hands over her dirty skin. Touching first her small pert breasts, the smooth mound of her belly, then letting her fingers slide down between her legs as she became excited by her own rich, filthy odor. As the old lady stood on the patio, staring into the night, the girl started to breathe hard, almost gasping, sliding her middle finger in and out of herself. Her mouth tasted hot and sweet, though her breath was fetid-smelling. She could feel her blood pulsing in her veins, her heart beginning to hammer.
    She swung her head from side to side in a smooth, impassioned rhythm.
    She slid her finger in and out faster and faster.
    She watched the woman.
    Felt the damp grass beneath her feet, the wet leaves.
    It was intoxicating.
    Now the old lady was coming, coming right in her direction, but with a slow and stiff gait as old people used because their muscles were atrophying and their bones were brittle.
    “ Come, come, come,” the girl whispered beneath her hot breath. “Come closer and I’ll show you.”
    The girl was supposed to cause a commotion to lure the old lady outside, but it hadn’t been necessary because the old woman was very curious, a very nosy old snit and she had come all on her own. And wasn’t that just perfect? Wasn’t that just sweet? Wasn’t that just delicious? She came right out the back door while in the front—
    As the old lady meandered closer, a cool night wind brought the smell of things full-blooded and alive, the earthy smell of things dead. The girl was trembling with anticipation. The wind made her nipples stand taut. She let herself come, shuddering with the drunken release of it.
    The old woman was closer.
    The girl waited, teeth clenched, nostrils flaring.
    A cloud passed over the face of the moon.
    When the moonlight returned, the girl was gone.
     
    4
    Margaret was beginning to wonder what she was doing.
    Beginning to wonder if there didn’t come a time when you had to accept your age and the limitations it forced upon you.
    There was no reason for her to put herself through this nonsense simply to investigate a shadow that was probably nothing but a shadow at best and at worst, probably one of the neighborhood kids playing hide-and-go-seek. She could have called Bud. He was only a block away. Bud would come over with his flashlight. The big long-handled flashlight that he kept up in the cupboard next to the box that contained his old police badges and yellowed photographs of his days on the force. Bud would have liked to get that call, would have liked to come over and investigate because it would have made him feel young again, like a cop, not a retired old man with a bad back, weak knees, and poor circulation who had more than once fallen asleep before the TV with the heating pad cranked high and burned himself because the feeling in his limbs just wasn’t so good anymore.
    Funny how life gets you, she thought. How it tricks you and fools you with youth and good health and then, when you’re not looking, the years pile up like apples under a tree. Next thing you know you’re old and gray and you realize you’ve been had. You can tell yourself amusing little self-deluding things like you’re only as old as you feel and life starts at sixty, but you know down deep it’s a load of crap. Soon enough you’re in a nursing home, pissing yourself and playing bingo and hoping your mind will