The Flowers Read Free Page B

too and I was standing there maybe ten feet away, one hand with the big knife loaded in it, the other hand clenched and a little up, looking ready to jab in a left-right combination.
    â€œWatch yourself now, kid,” he says, stepping inside toward me.
    I stepped back, though not like I was backing off.
    â€œYou have to put that down right now,” he says to me. “You just drop it, okay kid?”
    I didn’t say nothing. I stepped back once more, keeping the same distance between us. He stepped toward me again and I backed up once more, thinking where a knife should go.
    Then he went at me. He was so fast he took me down even before I saw him come and his hand locked my hand with the knife in it to the floor. He pushed the air out of me because his body on me was so heavy I couldn’t breathe. Goofy was growling and biting him and I was trying to at least kick his nuts but I didn’t do a thing to him and when I made him roll a little, it made the knife dig into my own stomach.

    He got me onto my back and pinned me, both my hands pressed to the floor, his knees into my chest, hurting my ribs, the knife not cutting me or him.
    â€œStop,” he says, too close to my face. “You gonna stop?” Goofy was back to biting him and that was when he let go of me, ripping the knife away from me as he stood up. Goofy kept going for his leg until his hard black shoe lifted her jaw and head when he kicked her there really hard, and she whimpered, hurt. I got up once he got off me, and I was crying, and I saw how I was bleeding at my stomach. It didn’t hurt or nothing yet. He was standing there watching me for what might not have been such a long time, and then he just turned around and took off out the broken front door.
    And so all the time it seemed like I was hearing her on the phone when I didn’t want to. I probably wanted to know, but I didn’t want to hear. Wondered who it was when I heard her going,
Whatever I have to do,
or,
No, I won’t, no.
The phone was nothing good. It was like waiting on a school bell, jumping at how loud and always expecting. When I can’t not listen in on her, I want to smash that quiet between. When it was her voice I was following, when there was silence it meant that some shit would hit. So I tried to never listen. I made it go black inside my head, and then words, when she’d make them, were these shapes that wormed around, spraying light that would disappear into a hole that was bigger than any room I been in.
    It was like right then, even if it was really days or something, that my mom introduced me to Cloyd Longpre. He was wearing a fake blue suit and tie. I never saw him in one ever again. Also, his hair was all pomade oil. That also would be the only time it was so neat that you could see the comb lines. I was sitting on our couch in the living room, and he sat in a chair—it was Goofy’s favoriteunless she was sitting with me on the couch watching the TV—across from me, a kind of stupid but really happy stupid smile on his face. He had a silver tooth on one side, showing at the edge of his mouth. Between us was the floor where I’d been taken down. I was still feeling mad about it, so there was that. Not the cut. I didn’t care about that. It didn’t hurt no more. It didn’t really hurt even when it was supposed to, right after. My mom was sitting next to me. She was wearing a flower dress—I think roses, though I call all flowers roses—a new one, and shiny red shoes that matched. She was being too pretty like always. I loved my mom, and sometimes it scared me because I thought maybe I wasn’t supposed to say that even to myself. Maybe I wouldn’t have thought about it except that I was always seeing how men looked at her. When I did too, just to think about what it was about, I knew what it was about. How pretty she was in the way men are flipping through pages of dirty magazines. My mom