Specimen & Other Stories Read Free

cell phones didn’t deserve to have friends, or family for that
matter, if they were going to behave so badly.
    Some days when Ken was in a bad mood he made
lists of people he would kill for free. People who abused and
abandoned their pets. Drivers who didn’t signal their turns. People
who tossed litter on the sidewalks. Owners of very expensive cars
who always seemed to have handicapped placards on their dashboards
so they could park where they pleased.
    He looked at her again and wracked his brain
for something to say. Her beauty was a frightening hurdle, like a
mountain in the distance that he wanted to climb but knew that he
would run out of oxygen and die before he reached its peak.
    She turned the page in the newspaper, picked
up her coffee, sipped it again, and her eyes drifted briefly his
way.
    “Would you like a date square?” he said to
her, regretting it immediately. Could he have picked anything more
ridiculous to say?
    She looked at him and after a moment a
crooked little smile appeared on her lips. “Who you calling a
square?”
    It took him a few seconds before he got it.
Word play. She was messing with him. He liked that. His heart
started pounding like a big bass drum.
    “You’d never make it as a square,” he said.
“Too many curves.”
    “The better to roll with the punches,” she
said.
    “Anyone punched you,” he said, “I’d tear
their arms off and club them to death with the stumps.”
    “Ooh, that’s the nicest thing anyone’s said
to me all day.”
    “Did I...? Oh, I’m sorry. I thought I was
only thinking it. Sometimes things slip out.”
    “Yes, I know. It’s like that motherfucking
Tourette’s Syndrome. Don’t you just hate when that happens?”
    “Don’t get me started. There are so many
things to hate.”
    “You know what pisses me off?” she said.
“Take a walk along Avenue Road, see how so many handicapped people
seem to drive a BMW, a Mercedes or a Porsche. I’d like to line up
the doctors who signed those permits and run over their legs with a
bulldozer.”
    Ken couldn’t believe his ears. It was both
shocking and exciting to hear someone who thought so much like him.
He stood up, but he wasn’t sure whether he should walk or run away.
The last time he’d expressed an attraction for a woman, she’d
called 911.
    “Would you like something? Date square,
chocolate brownie, macadamia nut cookie...?”
    “What? I thought you were asking me for a
date. Now who’s square?”
    He stared down at her. Was she still messing
with him? This was worse than Sudoku. The numbers didn’t add up.
She was beautiful and innocent, and he was a beast with homicidal
hands. What kind of children would they have?
    Ken looked from her to the other end of the
sofa, where the guy was now curled up like a pretzel, still on the
phone. “I wouldn’t have said something like that, not when you’re
with someone.”
    She made a dismissive wave. “My idiot
brother?” She looked at her watch. “We were supposed to catch up,
on account of we haven’t seen each other, for like a month, but
he’s been on the phone all this time and now my break’s over and
I’ve got to get back to work.”
    “Where’s that?”
    “The Gap on the next block.”
    She stood up, made the universal
thumb-and-pinkie signal to her brother. Call me, asshole .
And walked out.
    Ken followed her into the sunlight. Briefly,
it was like something out of a movie, where the earthlings step out
of the spaceship and the new world is all bright and shiny and
marvelous and they know somehow everything’s going to be all
right.
    He saw it too late to warn her. Some idiot
had left a juice bottle lying on the second step. She slipped on it
and would have taken a header onto the sidewalk if Ken hadn’t
reached out with reptilian reflex and grabbed her bicep in his
hand. He held her steady until she was on the sidewalk.
    “Oh my God, your hands are so amazingly
strong.” She looked up at him with gratitude. “And