Circling the Drain by Amanda Davis Read Free Book Online Page B

thought Lily. What am I, nuts? I’m in love with a boy who chases freight trains and now I think I have to get rid of his horse to capture his heart? That’s crazy!
    But love is a powerful thing when it’s under your skin and pricking your pores. As she watched them head to head, she was swept away by the sour taste of it, so Lily plotted to kill the horse.
    One night, while Wonder was tied up and the boy was chasing whiskeys with sodas, Lily crept outside and looked the big blue horse in its big brown eyes and said: I’m sorry about this, Wonder, it’s nothing personal. And she placed a thick, poisonous soup made from simmered jealousy and swollen desire at Wonder’s hoofs and went back inside to chase the boy who chased trains.
    She asked loose questions about the night and the sound of the trains while she sat on the bar stool and saw the blue threads, the same color as Wonder, the blue bottles catching starlight in the windows. She thought of talking a blue streak and feeling blue, of blueberries and blue cheese, of bluebells and bluebonnets and blue jays and blue jeans, and when she looked into the boy’s deep blue eyes she felt a sharp jab in her gut.
    Wonder died quickly, not from Lilly’s stewed ill will butfrom the chemical reaction the ill will had with the aluminum pot. It doesn’t really matter, what matters is that he died.
    And the boy found him.
    And when he did, his grief was huge. It snapped him open. It scooped him out and the weight of it flattened him like a cracker, dry and crumbling.
    Wonder was dead and part of the boy was gone. Wind blew through the huge gaping hole in him. The world echoed unevenly and became dark.
    Lily tried to comfort the boy but it was as though he had deflated and she didn’t have air enough for both of them. She watched as he sat in the dirt of the plains, of the fields, by the road, motionless in the shirt she had made him, stitched so carefully with her love. The shirt grew tattered and its threads turned black.
    Then it turned to rags. This was a quick process; soon the shirt was in rags and the boy was in rags and Lily watched him day and night and wondered at what she’d done, for she was invisible to him. Everything seemed invisible to him now. He even kept his back to the trains when they rolled through, held his hands over his ears and refused to hear their whistles.
    Lily couldn’t take it. Not only was he blind to her, but she didn’t like the ragged boy nearly as much as she had before.
    Ma, I tried to bewitch the boy who loved a horse more than me and now I think I’ve broken him.
    Her mother looked up from her tiny stitches and saw her daughter all twisted into a knot and was filled with worry. That’s no good, she said. You have to find him another horse. You can’t rob someone to find love, honey. That never works.
    A horse. A horse? Not another horse, but something. Lily had to do something, so she plucked the hollow boy fromthe side of the road and slipped him into her battered Volvo and drove two days and two nights without sleeping, all the time silent, teeth gritted, hollow boy staring out the window where she’d propped him so he could see the land pass.
    They came to a city where the boy had never been and Lily fed him in a loud and crowded restaurant and pushed him along a dirty crowded street but the boy seemed not to notice.
    C’mon, she said: This is for your own good.
    Then she toted him upstairs to a green platform and the boy stirred a little, surrounded by the very thing he’d never understood. He was wading knee-deep in the kudzu of man. When the subway roared in, the boy’s eyes opened wide and his heart began to pound again and Lily saw color return to his cheeks.
    Hey? she whispered: How about this?
    She waited to see what would happen, but he didn’t move while the people swarmed in, and then the silver boxes that contained them, one strung to another like an