A Good and Useful Hurt by Aric Davis Read Free Book Online

school.”
    “Pretty good?”
    She laughed. “It has its moments.”
    “But it’s not good?”
    “I never said that.”
    The cab let them out, and Mike reached for his wallet, but Deb beat him to it.
    “My idea, my treat.”
    “Fine, but I get to buy the tickets.”
    “No way. My idea, my treat.”
    “I get to make it up to you then.”
    “Is that a threat?”
    “What?”
    “We have got to work on your funny bone. Hurry up or we’re gonna be late.”
    Mike clomped through the snow after her and followed her into the building.
    It was nice inside, not at all the kind of hippy-run thing he’d expected, and some of the artwork on the walls was actually pretty good. They stood in line to buy tickets, and Deb said, “You should do a showing here.”
    “They’d never take my stuff.”
    “Why? You’re better than a lot of this, and I’ve only seen the stuff at the store.”
    “My work is just not the kind of stuff you’d see at an art gallery.”
    “You’d see it at an art gallery like this.”
    “How did you find this place?”
    “Places like this find me everywhere I go.” She smiled, and then it was their turn to buy tickets. She paid and he watched.
    They sat together in the middle of the theater, at the end of a row, because Deb hated walking in front of people to use the bathroom. Mike just sat and waited. He’d never been to an indie movie theater, and he didn’t really know what to expect. The crowd looked fairly normal, but he had to remind himself that normal to him was pretty damn weird to most other people. The lights dimmed, and they sat in silence.
    The first preview was for a movie that, at least to Mike, looked absolutely awful. It appeared to be about a black man who decided to be a ninja. Mike gave himself a mental reminder to tell Lamar about it. The second preview was for a movie he was pretty sure he had seen. It looked like a horror flick he’d watched a couple years before, only this version was done in Japanese.
    The credits rolled, and the movie started. Deb leaned into his right shoulder, and unsure of what else to do, Mike let her weight rest against him as he watched the movie.
    The movie, at least as far as Mike could figure it, was about three sisters living the most fucked-up lives he’d ever heard of. The youngest sister’s boyfriend killed himself for some reason at the start of the movie, and later on a student at the high school she was temping at blackmailed her. The middle sister was married to a man who drugs his whole family in order to molest his son’s friends. In addition to sodomizing children, he teaches his young son to masturbate. The oldest sister wanted to get raped for some reason, but when she was finally able to get someone to agree to do it, she denigrated the man, who was her neighbor, until he left. The oldest sister had another neighbor who was raped—she didn’t want to be, of course—and she ended up killing the assailant. After breaking the man’s neck, she cut him up into little pieces and froze them. She threw a few small bags away every day. The film ended with the son who was taught to masturbate finally bringing his new hobby to climax. The family dog subsequently ate the ejaculate and then licked the boy’s face. Credits.
    Mike was unsure of what to say or do when the movie ended. He tried to think it through. Deb had seen the movie already, but she had brought him anyway, with no warning. She’d known. They sat in silence while the credits rolled, and when they finished she stood and he did as well.
    She was grinning at him and said, “What did you think?”
    “I think that was the most fucked-up movie I’ve ever seen.”
    “Did you like it?”
    “What was there to like? It was disgusting.”
    “You didn’t leave.”
    “I wanted to see what awful thing was going to happen next.”
    They walked outside, and snow was falling.
    “So you liked it.”
    “I didn’t like it. Wanting to know what comes next and liking a movie