Apricot brandy by Lynn Cesar Read Free Book Online

spread on the floor near the flames. She dropped to her knees and fell into it.

    * * * *
    She stood naked in the downstairs bathroom, in front of the mirror. Deep night was outside the window, the big house around her brimful of dead silence, and here she stood, both her hands squeezing her breasts till they ached, her eyes staring into themselves in the mirror. Her breasts hurt, she wasn’t dreaming. This self-caused pain had brought her full awake.
    Her hands stroked down her flanks, slid behind, and covetously traversed the curve of her buttocks.
    She said to her reflection, “Nice tits. Nice ass. Come on. I’ve got something special I want you to swallow, bitch.”
    Her smile was playfully cruel, not a trace in it of the terror that was freezing her, icing her solid from crown to sole. She watched herself give herself a wink, then turned and sashayed with a hooker’s gait out of the bathroom, down the hall, past the living room, butt still switching grotesquely, into the short hall before the front door. Yet, within all this movement, Karen hung bodiless, an icy axis of fear unlinked to the prankish body that carried her.
    This body opened the drawer of a lamp-table near the front door and found a prize. Took it out— a massive, blunt-nosed revolver, a .357. “Off to the dining room!” she crowed. “Let’s eat!”
    Sashaying into the half-dark of the dining room, she sat in Dad’s old chair at the head of the table… and set the revolver down to make a comic production of pulling the chair up comfortably to the table, like an eager gourmand settling in for the feed. Then Karen took up the gun again and turned the muzzle up towards her face, lacing the fingers of both hands around the back of the grip, hooking her left thumb across the trigger and her right thumb on the hammer. Karen could see plainly the domed slugs nested in the four exposed chambers.
    “And now,” she said cheerily, “you degenerate little bitch, bon appétit! ”
    She leaned down and took the two inches of the muzzle in her mouth, while inside she thrashed with a frenzy that didn’t stir the least muscle of her body. Her most extreme will could move no more of her than her eyes, which she raised to the breakfront across the room and found within the moonlit glass her mother’s face, visible after all. She looked helplessly at the deep-set darkness of Mom’s eyes, at Mom’s young lips, parted as if about to speak… .
    She cocked the hammer with a sharp meaty click and squeezed the trigger home. When the hammer slammed into the cartridge her bladder let go as her terror, in a surge, reentered the circuits of her body, convulsing her, toppling her chair backwards.
    Gasping, she found it was herself who drew these breaths, that her limbs were hers again. She got to her knees and knelt over the pistol on the floor. Reached for it, recoiled, then forced herself to seize it.
    Her legs shaking badly, Karen stood up, horror and rage sputtering in her like a wet flare. Releasing the gate, she swung the cylinder out. Six rounds, the chambered one pitted by the firing pin.
    Lurching at first, still unsure of her power to act, but moving at a dead run by the time she crossed the kitchen, she sent the back door crashing open, and took aim at Dad’s brandy trees. Speed-fired the pistol empty.
    Five muzzle-flares geysered, five thunders merged into one and left her ears deaf and keening with pain.
    Her flame-scared vision clearing, she broke out the cylinder again and emptied it on the porch. Five empty casings and one unfired round, dimpled by the pin.
    Long afterwards, Karen lay in her sleeping bag, holding that round. The windows were just beginning to gray. A few hours ago she’d guzzled more than a quart of hundred-proof brandy, yet her body was as pure and sober as a child’s. She’d never felt so clean of booze. The monster that had filled her had purged every molecule of it. The monster was Dad, the monster was alcohol, the monster was