As I Die Lying by Scott Nicholson Read Free Book Online Page B

wedding cake when they’re
trying to toast their future divorce.
    "I've been away too long," my friend said. "I
should have come sooner. I let you get hurt."
    My body scooted across the rough plywood
floor and followed Sally out of the hole. My nose took in the crisp
aroma of crushed flowers and torn grass, the perfume of
honeysuckle, and the smell of early dew. My ears heard a sleepy
meadowlark spinning a lullaby. My hands stung from the sharp prick
of fallen thorns as my body crawled. It was my flesh, but not
me.
    My head was poking out of the hole in the
fence when my eyes saw a white slipper in the moonlight. And from
the slipper, a long familiar leg rose up into the night sky.
    Mother's shoe.
    Mother's leg.
    Mother.
    My body stood, with the help of her hand
lifting it by my shirt collar. My eyes looked around, adjusting to
the brighter light of this outside world. Sally was hugging Mrs.
Bakken over by the hickory trees, pressing her face into her
mother's chest, and now the sound of Sally's wild crying reached my
ears, drowning out the meadowlark's song.
    "What's going on here, young man?" Mother
asked my body, her voice a wedge of ice driven into my ears.
    "Here?" my voice said, the strange muscles in
my throat vibrating. Where was “here”? I thought I was in the Bone
House.
    "He made me, Mommy," Sally shrieked. "He
made me do bad things."
    Bad things? What bad things? Oh.
    Those.
    Sally squealed, her wet whimpers carrying
across the apartment's backyard and into the night. My eyes saw
lights blinking on across the back wall of the apartment building,
my ears heard windows sliding open, my nose smelled cigarette smoke
as heads stuck out to see if what was going on outside was better
than their television shows.
    "He made me go in there,
then he made me kiss him. I tried to get away, but he kept grabbing me," Sally
said. "And he wouldn't let me go."
    She wailed like an air-raid siren, and was as
well-rehearsed. Mother looked into my eyes as if she knew who I was
and shook my shoulders. "Richard, what do you have to say for
yourself?"
    Richard? Yes, that was me. Yet not me. My
head nodded, flopping up and down like a wet mop’s. Just the way my
friend made it.
    Mrs. Bakken stroked the top of Sally's head
as if she were petting a rabbit. "There, there, honey, it will be
okay. Did he hurt you?" Mrs. Bakken said, looking over at Mother
and my borrowed flesh.
    "N-no, Mommy." Sally
sniffled extra loudly in case someone in the apartment windows
hadn't heard the first time. "But he tried to. He tried to lift up
my dress and was talking crazy things like putting his pee-pee in
me and making me bleed. And I was so scared ."
    She mixed the last word with a half-moan that
yawned out through the trees and across the junkyard. My body was
standing on legs that felt like wobbly stacks of tin cans.
    "I'm so sorry," Mother said to Sally. "I
swear, I don't know where he gets his meanness from."
    Then, to me, "Lord, wait till your father
hears about this." Then, to Sally, "You sure you're okay,
honey?"
    Sally nodded, bouncing her pigtails for
emphasis, and wiped her eyes on her mother's shirt. "I've got a
hole in my stocking, Mommy.”
    "It's not your fault,” Mrs. Bakken said, and
she looked all the way through my little friend into the dark place
where I was hiding. Now I knew where Sally had learned to cut with
invisible knives. It ran in the family.
    And she’d learned the lesson we all get to
eventually: it’s not whether you’re right or wrong, good or bad,
true or false—it’s whether you have someone to blame.
    I looked back down the long dark hall at Mrs.
Bakken's face, cheeks paler than moonlight, her skin stretched as
tight as panty hose over the steep bone of her head. Her eyes were
as black as crow's wings, eyes that shot secrets out of the sky.
And she saw that I saw.
    "While the cat's away, the mice will splay,"
my little friend said to Mrs. Bakken, using my voice.
    "What are you talking about?" Mrs.