The Lonely Read Free Page A

crashing down on me I passed out and became just a bleeding ornament in The Woods. As still and broken as a stone cherub, pushed over and cracked open.
    Then . I remembered a cascading white tablecloth, like whipping cream stopped in its tracks. I’m under a banquet table at a wedding that I barely remember but have seen pictures of myself at. Friends of The Parents who they never see anymore. Both of my dimpled fists submerged in frosty metal dishes of melted ice cream like I was at the manicurist, listening to my name screamed, starting off as a yell then dissolving into a sob. I wanted to cry out to them but Julia said, “Shhhhh.” That was the first time she got me in really big trouble.
    I think about that tablecloth. A paused videotape. It’s odd the way that things tend to stop looking like themselves when you take their motion away.
    And suddenly I became very aware of my bleeding. A dark red pool, throbbing with awkwardly spreading growth over and under the leaves on the ground. Speckles of gore caught light all the way to the path.
    It didn’t really hurt, but I could feel it, the blood escaping my body, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. It slipped from me smooth. Effortlessly. Like coins from an undiscovered hole in a pocket.
    I looked up and saw the shape of Julia’s head looking down at me over the side of the rock wall. Her hair hung around her face in ringlets of uncoiled snake skin.
    â€œJulia!” I barely rasped. The effort caused me to cough uncontrollably.
    â€œCan you move that thing?” she asked.
    I squirmed a bit and tried to push it, but it was no use. My legs were mush, the boulder was halfway into the ground, and every effort to move on my part was exhausting. Just lying there, not moving, was ecstasy by comparison.
    With effort, I shook my head no.
    â€œGood,” she said. “Now I’m going to go to The House to see what this terrible thing is.”
    â€œWait, wait!” I growled.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œHow did you get Elizabeth’s bridle down here?”
    â€œDon’t ask stupid questions, Easter.”
    And with that she was off. I tried to call again but all that came out of my mouth was a whisper of rattled phlegm.
    What an asshole. Knowing Julia, she probably wouldn’t be coming back. She would leave me here to die because that’s what I was going to do to her. She was very vengeful, that sister of mine. I suppose I couldn’t blame her though. Dying on a forest floor is exactly what I deserved.
    So I just lay there. Coming to terms with the fact that I’d be bleeding to death for the rest of the day. I wish I could say that I was upset or worried or even scared, but I wasn’t. I was almost looking forward to relaxing for a good long while. I just didn’t want to spend the last few hours of my life lying in the dirt beneath a huge rock, enduring a long, slow death as opposed to the quick one I’d always dreamed of for myself.
    The Terrible Thing. The Terrible Thing is ultimately what put me here. And The Parents were mostly responsible for The Terrible Thing. I started thinking that my slow and uncomfortable end was really all their fault and how, in that way, parents are just as responsible for your death as they are for your birth. They set you on the tangent along which you inevitably die. I wonder if thinking about this tangent is what it means to have your life flash before your eyes. It probably is, though I bet most people’s life-flash tangents are populated with happier things: memories of barbequed hotdogs over checkerboard tablecloths or the smell of a loved one’s shoulder. Not just spite for negligent parents.
    I should come clean about one thing first though: I don’t have a fat cousin named Denise who threw her fetus in a garbage can. I lied. Sorry.

Babydom
    I was born fourteen years ago in a big hospital in Canada. This is because The Parents were visiting Niagara Falls