100 Unfortunate Days by Penelope Crowe Read Free Book Online Page B

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    The spiders start to crawl all over your feet and up your legs. They are biting you, and you know they are black widows. They can crawl so fast. You don’t feel well and you begin to fall—and as you begin to fall you hit the panel of letters and numbers with the side of your head and the door opens because you needed to suffer first. The spiders vanish because they were never really there and you feel much better, and you step into a modern room filled with windows. It smells of salt from the ocean.
    There are paintings and pictures on the walls, images from your mind, images you would paint if you knew how. The white curtains billow in the soft breeze in front of windows that run from the floor to the 30 foot ceilings. You think you could live here forever except for the black shadows you see out of the corner of your eye. You know if you don’t call people and tell them where you are, they will forget you and never come visit you again. When you look out the windows you see the ocean all around and you look and look until it gets dark and you notice the white beacon of light going round and round. You realize you live in a lighthouse 1,000 feet above the sea and you will no longer have visitors.

Day 53
    I dreamt I could fly. I was sitting on the roof of my father’s station wagon with my legs crossed and I had a miniature drink umbrella from the Chinese food restaurant in each hand. When my father started to drive I took off and floated around town for a while. If I tipped to the right, I turned right—same with the left. I flew up to Rt. 22 and down the highway a bit.
    When I got to Robert Hall, the automatic doors glided open and I flew right in, navigating up and down the rows of men’s suits. I could see myself in the mirrors between the aisles. I got tired and hot so I stopped to lean against one of the columns holding up the ceiling and pressed my cheek against it because it was so cool. I left it there for such a long time. My cheek looked red when I looked at myself in the mirror.

Day 54
    I am the latest bloomer. My eyes have seen things my brain did not register—or I chose not to consider.

Day 55
    In New Guinea there is a tribe that used to consider eating the brains of the dead part of their tradition. Some members of this tribe walked around like the undead, staring and seeming not to hear, and stumbling around with a stiff and awkward gait—zombies. The prions from the dead brains affect the living brains of the tribe members who ate them—something like mad cow disease in people. Sometimes it takes years for this disease to take hold—so even though this practice was stopped years ago—people are still developing this zombie disease which is called Kuru—or there is the slight chance that they really are zombies and this is just another indicator of Armageddon.
    A much better indicator, in my opinion, than frogs falling from the sky or swarms of locusts.

Day 56
    Did you pull the wings off of a bee when you were a kid? How about the legs off of a spider? Did you ever bury a cat up to its neck and run it over with a lawn mower? Or put some alcohol on a beetle then set it on fire and to watch it walk and start to glow before it stopped moving? Did you ever lie to make someone look bad? Or lie to make yourself look good? Did you ever throw a lit match at someone’s face? Did you ever spit in someone’s food? Or put ingredients in that should not be in food? Masturbating in the car, how about that? Did you ever pretend you were deaf just for fun? Did you ever hit a dog, or your child? Cut yourself, scratch yourself, punch something really hard and break a finger because you were mad that you’d bitten your tongue? Wish something were dead? Wish you were dead?



Day 57
    Every single basement has a dark corner or room no one likes. Maybe the whole basement is dark and scary. Spirits collect in dark and cluttered spaces. They hide and wait for you because they